District 297 aims to solve a very important problem on the island of Aruba which is Brain Drain.
The Aruban diaspora tends to further their education in countries outside of the island, countries like the Netherlands, USA and Costa Rica. This is great in terms of opportunities for the locals but, their knowledge and expertise is being used and applied in other economies. In a world driven by innovation, Aruba is playing catch up.
The main goal of this platform is to connect these professionals to opportunities on the island and to other professionals. Finding these opportunities can be difficult since there isn’t a hub where these listings are posted, but there is now.
In order to create this platform the design thinking methodology was used. The target audience was defined and 3 user personas were selected. What followed were interview sessions with some members of this audience to find out what they are missing or need to decide to go back to Aruba.
With this data the overall structure of the platform was defined using Wireframes. Then a high-fidelity version was designed and turned into a fully interactive prototype.
After a couple of iterations on this prototype, a new set of audience members were invited to participate in usability testing sessions.
Based on the insights of these testing sessions a report was made and given to the client as a final deliverable for the UX/UI phase of the project.
1.Wireframing
2.Prototyping
3.Testing
4.Reporting
The overall impression of the users of the prototype were very positive and provided us with a list of features and new ideas that could be used for the future development of the platform. These sessions also gave us a clearer idea of what needed to go into the development phase and which features could be put on the backlog for future sprints.
In terms of professional development this project gave me the opoprtunity to apply almost everything I had learned at school and beyond. It also showed me where my strengths are and on which of my weaknesses I needed to pay extra attention to. In the end I finished this project feeling confident and ready for the next challenges.
Get in touch and let’s create something awesome!