OLD SITE

01. Abstract

“PlaneCarBoat is a site that indexes all of the most signifigant tech events around the world.”

Before starting, I spent a lot of time thinking about the problems I face, and the many students in similar positions. I know plenty of designers who will be graduating soon, most are looking for ways to stand out amongst a sea of other graduates. This is a commonly faced problem amongst young creators, so I looked for a way to show students that there are other ways to get immersed in the design world.

02. Role

UX Designer UI Designer Content Curator (Coded in collaboration with Isaiah Morales)

03. Launch Date

February 5th, 2019

04. The Idea

Many students will tell you how difficult it is to stand out from their classmates, my goal was to create a resource that these students could use to find new and creative ways to gain positive industry exposure. Participating in design events and hackathons is a great way to gain this experience and reputation. This site would be a curated index of the most tech-savvy events, meetups, seminars, demonstrations, conferences and symposiums the world has to offer.

“My goal was to make it easy and convenient for students in my position to find this information and use it to grow.”

05. Questions

“Should users be prompted to submit events they find to the site?”

I thought it may make upkeep much easier if people were submitting events they found directly to me. But during my research, I realized that it would be more streamline to simply curate the events myself weekly, rather than rely on visitors submissions. (Visitors do still have the option to suggest, it’s just a bit less prominent.)

“What categories should be used to filter events?”

I decided that in order to keep this site from becoming too broad, we would keep the categories of events listed somewhat narrow. I found that even with these stringent parameters, there was still a huge number of events to pick from.

I wanted to keep this site from straying too far from the design community by ensuring that the majority of events were somehow related to UX, UI, Hacking or other forms of digital technology (some of which fall under the “Misc.” category, such as AR/VR and Artificial Intelligence events.)

Fortunately we had help answering this question. We gave our users a small survey excercize to help understand which events would benefit them the most. From this, we landed on "Country" and "Tech Type" as our filtering categories.

06. Wireframes

My initial wireframes were a bit more complex than usual because I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted the site to look like, even before starting.

07. Final Designs

My final design decisions were a culmination of research, iterations and conversations with a group of students who fit the targeted demographic. I wanted to keep the site attractive yet functional, so that visitors feel warm and welcome upon arrival, then stick around for the content.

I felt that a brief introductory page would be a simple way to explain the site (shown above), and as long as it was designed correctly, there shouldn’t be much of a bounce increase.

Ill be scrutinizing the sites analytics for a few months after initial launch to see if this intro page should be kept, changed, or even possibly trashed.

08. Results

Overall, this project ended up being a far better learning experience than I had initially expected. Due to time constraints, things felt a bit rushed, but it was still one of my favorite so far. I plan to continue creating interesting sites like this in the future.

One of my favorite parts of this project was simply talking with students and friends, trying to better empathize with the situations and plights we all go through during this strange transition process from student to professional. I can only hope that my site can help students through these curious moments.

Thanks for viewing my project!