Buildiy
Build Together. Learn Forever.
My Role: UX Designer. Wireframing. Mockups. Prototypes.
Previously called DIY Daddy, this project came to life during a weekend long event called "Hackout" hosted by Startout. The purpose of this event was to inspire potential entrepreneurs in the LGBTQIA community to learn the ropes of validating an idea for a startup or lifestyle business and turn that idea into a business venture.
In just 54 hours, we experienced the highs, lows, fun, and pressures that make up life at a startup. As we learned how to create a real company, we met the very best mentors, investors, co-founders, and sponsors who were ready to help us get started.
Our team leader and the man behind the idea, Tracy, pitched his idea for a company that helps people learn how to "DIY" by getting real professionals to help customers, and at a fraction of the cost of paying these professionals to complete that task for you. Everyone pictured below chose to work on this company for the weekend, and some of us are continuing to build this project and move to the next stages to try and get it off the ground.
Our team split into groups so that each of us could make the most of the little time we had to build this company, do our research, and get the deliverables we needed for our presentation/pitch together in the most efficient way possible.
As the UX Designer for the group, I worked directly with Tracy and our product manager to make sure we were going in the correct direction and staying true to the Buildiy vision.
We brainstormed to build out a user flow for the app so we could determine what pages were important to create for our presentation to the judges at the end of the weekend, and to determine what the high level needs of our users would be.
Now we had direction and an idea of the pages I needed to create so I began sketching out wireframes to get an idea of how our screens could look.
This project was intended to be a responsive web app, so that was taken into consideration while designing these screens. We only had time to design for the mobile breakpoint for this event, but we are continuing to work on this project and build it for other device breakpoints as well.
Normally, if more time was allowed, I would have put together an interactive paper prototype to test with our target users to ensure everything made sense to our users before moving on to mockups.
Since this weekend had such a quick turn around, we needed to go to mock ups as soon as possible to allow additional time to build an inVision prototype before the weekend was over, and before we gave our presentation.
With the mockups looking good I started to build our interactive prototype on inVision so we could demonstrate our high level app functions to our audience and the judges that we would be presenting to during our 5 minute pitch to sell the idea of our company, and to show that it could be a real viable product, that people will want.
During our presentation, Tracy was our speaker, while I worked the slide show and the prototype (live) on the computer. Tracy went through our problem statement and our proposed solution, then we introduced our interactive prototype and I clicked through the prototype as he explained how our users would use our platform.
We nailed the presentation and the judges were impressed by our thorough research and go to market strategy. We got 2nd place!
With this success, some of the team members from this project are continuing to work on Buildiy and move through the next steps of turning this idea into a real company. As of now, I am continuing as the UX Designer for this startup and will continue to work with Tracy and our developers to expand on this idea as the project continues to grow.
Take a look at a few of the projects I have created from the ground up.
