Pride Places is an online directory that helps LGBTQ+ businesses share their services to those looking for them.
During my internship, I worked on Pride Places 3.0, a new platform to foster community engagement while still providing the LGBTQ+ community access to businesses they are looking for.
Scope: Concept Testing, Wireframing, UI Designs, Concept Presentation
Time: 11 month product design internship
Brainstorm/planning: Trello, ClickUp, FigJam
Design: Figma
Testing/insights: Zoom, Google Suite
Collaboration: Zoom, Slack
I was one of 5 product design interns on this project, in charge of the design ideations, UI explorations and part of concept testing and UX strategy for a new community platform.
Through extensive concept testing, we designed a mobile MVP social media platform aimed at achieving key goals for the company.
Encouraging user-generated content to keep users engaged with the platform and each other.
Provides the company with better opportunities to monetize and generate revenue.
Providing access to resources that research shows are wanted and currently missing for the LGBTQ+ community.
"Our goal is simple: to build stronger, bigger and better LGBTQ-friendly businesses and organizations, and provide an easy-to-use resource for our community that makes people from all over want to visit, live in and be a part of the LGBTQ community in your town."
- Pride Places
We noticed low activity on the site, and reevaluated how the directory aligned with our core values.
As a passion-driven startup, in order to grow as a business, Pride Places needed increases in sales, users and content. We were in a good position for new ideas!
Goal: search for an establishment and view details that match their search criteria.
Success: finding/visiting the establishment.
Not enough listings or content (user reviews, ratings, etc) for users to get a full, interactive experience.
Goal: to attract new customers to their business.
User use, retention, and interaction is low.
For Pride Places, there are little monetization options.
For concept testing, I wanted to understand users’ preferences, frustrations, and challenges to determine the future direction of Pride Places’s core product.
Each designer designed wireframes for a different concept, and we put it to in front of users.
40 minute Zoom interviews. Demographic info, qualitative and quantitative data. For each session, 2 of the 4 concepts were randomly tested.
6 forms to account for order biases. Each form asked questions on 2/4 concepts. The forms were shared through various online channels (e.g. slack, FB groups, orgs)
The team took these insights from concept testing and correlated them with features shown in the concept testing. We then consolidated all the features into our platform.
Goal: Motivate user generated content (UGC) creation within onboarding to start the user interaction process that is the basis of the whole platform.
I played around with having the onboard process be a bit more interactive, and not just the typical information input. This does make the process a little longer, but our goal was to give users ample opportunities to share their own stories.
On the business side, I wanted to make it as in-depth as possible to give business owners the most opportunity to advertise their businesses to users on the site.
I designed unique ways users would be prompted to create an account. To incentivize users to create one, I proposed setting limits on how much content could be accessed without an account.
It was important to create avenues for businesses to connect with users/potential consumers. Businesses can initiate business profile creation when prompted to create a user account.
To promote UGC, I designed a flow for users to share their experiences publicly. Users can engage with this anytime after finalizing their account creation.
There were multiple edits made on the homepage. I iterated on the different ways the homepage could be structured. We deviated from text heavy cards to making the image the focal point that takes up most of the screen.
I iterated on different ways the cards could be designed, ranging from posts that are just text to posts that include media. The goal was to have the information be legible without being overwhelming with information.
This project was my first time working with a design team to create some thing tangible, and I learned a lot from working with fellow designers, engineers, and project manager.
Because I was designing for a community that I am personally not a part of, I made it of the upmost importance to do a lot of research to understand as best I could the pain points of the LGBTQ+ community. We made sure not to treat this community as a monolith, but rather as one filled with diverse groups of people with their own identities.
My time at Pride Places ended before the designs could reach their final stages, but I really look forward to seeing have far Pride Places will go in the future.