Case Study: Ironhack Bootcamp project #4 Editorial Project
Our fourth project at Ironhack required us to design a magazine. With my team member Desi we chose to collaborate on a Feminist Business magazine. We analysed current Business magazines for women and identified that there was no solution yet which unified clear, user friendly, gender neutral design and content. To start the project, we where given a User Persona to work with whose gender we changed from male to female. Our solution was supposed to be suitable for our assigned User Persona.
Desi and I collaborated remotely over a time period of 2 weeks from different timezones.
Our project began with User Research, analysing the market and was complemented by continuous User Testing and reaching out for feedback before we reached our final deliverable:
We conducted User Interviews with Users from our personal circles that matched our User Persona. We documented our initial feedback and conducted further research shaping our vision for the Design.
From our User research we concluded that we wanted to create a product that automatically puts together a newsfeed matching the Users interests based on their reading history:
Proceeding this we brainstormed possible features and mapped out the site structure:
as well as the Users Happy Path:
Our next step was to create Concept Sketches and conduct Concept Testing with Users.
We incorporated the feedback from look and usability into our Mid-Fi’s and conducted further testing, showing people our Design, asking them to use it and talk us through their experience and thoughts while using the product. We tried to understand if it was intuitive and enjoyable for them.
We analysed the visual design of our 3 main competitors YFS, She Owns It and Forbes Women and their brand attributes:
After having received feedback from our Users and analysing the competition we started building our own Brand attributes and a moodboard for the brand identity:
We conducted a user survey about our moodboard in order to understand if the brand attributes we aimed to represent resonated from our moodbard. We received feedback from our Users that our brand would be more inclusive to women of all backgrounds with less strong focus on luxury.
Following this we selected colors, typography and created a Design system:
Finalising our Magazine in our interactive prototype in Figma which can be viewed here.
Using auto-layout, we made our prototype responsive so it would work on different devices:
We discovered through this project that using auto-layout from the beginning makes it easy to create responsive designs and continuous testing helped us refine our product until it aligned with our Users needs and goals. Furthermore we saw that creating a Design system, using Styles & Components helped us keep our Design consistent and saved us time by simply reusing our components.
