Access Invision prototype here

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Context

Company

Ulule is a crowdfunding company operating in Europe and North America. It focuses on funding projects with a positive impact. Frequent projects funded on the platform include clothing or self-care brands, music or book releases and charity fundraising. These projects can be of many different sizes, raising from 1000 up to a million euros.

Ulule is often recommended by creators thanks to its coaching team, helping them succeed in funding their projects.

‍Project

Campus was my first project at Ulule. Its goal was to create a single platform for all training, learning and support content to give easy access to all the information needed by project creators. The expected benefit was to increase project success and reduce the number of questions to the project team.

My main role was UX, UI and information hierarchy while graphic design and content creation were handled by other team members.

Main softwares used for this project: Docs / Miro / Sketch / Invision

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Research

User research

The need for a unified learning content platform at Ulule came from growing feedback from the project team and creators. They pointed out that information about our platform and crowdfunding best practices was not easy to find, resulting in a loss of time for both sides. User interviews and discussion with the team confirmed this growing problem.

Workshops, personas and user journeys helped us identify how we could improve our learning documentation:

• Building a better UI design for the product itself (ulule.com)
• Providing easier access to information in and around the product
• Presenting learning and support content on a single place with better hierarchy
• Making the content adaptable to the knowledge and level of each user
  

The Campus project would focus on building a new unique platform for learning content while improving Ulule’s UI would be part of another project.

Listing content

After defining the scope of our project we listed all of our current content to better understand what we were going to work with. We ended up with the following list:

• Ulule community (our social space that ended up being a blog focused on support)
• Ulule support website
• Tips inside Ulule platform
• Knowledge of the project team
• Various guides in the form of docs, pdfs or videos
  

To make all this content available on a single platform we would need to reshape some of it. Most of it would become guides and less important information would go on our blog. We would also have to complete missing content and link orphan content such as learning programs and perks.

Benchmarking

Before getting into our own information hierarchy we did a lot of benchmarking on support and learning websites. This allowed us to confirm the need for an independent learning website that would gather all content in a single place.

Information hierarchy

The most important part of Campus project was definitely the information hierarchy, we worked closely with the project team to structure the content in relation to user needs.

Main hierarchy

The first step was to decide how to display content on the Campus website. We went for a straightforward approach with guides and blog posts being the two main categories while FAQ, learning programs, newsletters and our other services would be linked on the platform.

Guides and themes hierarchy

We then worked on the structure of our guides, creating 8 main themes that would each be linked to a specific timing or need of a crowdfunding campaign. This was also conducted in relation with users and project teams to ensure the coherence of our choices. These themes ended up being one of the main ways to easily browse through content in Campus.

The last information hierarchy task was then to divide content inside each guide and to create chapters for each one of them. This work allowed us to have very structured content in order to provide the best information for our users.

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Prototyping

After clearly establishing our content hierarchy we moved on to the wireframe design step. Our first goal was then to build a coherent homepage and navigation system.

Our navigation would have to allow access to the main content types as well as to the main themes we defined while being coherent with Ulule.com main website. For the homepage we had to experiment with many layouts drawing inspiration from the importance of each content type and our users' needs.

The rest of Campus' pages would be pretty standard and built following conventions from our design systems and findings from our benchmark. We tested a lot of different design for each page but always ended up building simplest and clearest UI in order to follow the goal of our support website which is quick and clear access to information.

A screen that needed more innovation was the theme page. We created an all new page presenting guides, blog posts, and more information on specific themes. Those theme page are here to allow easier navigation for our users and allow them to quickly find a solution to their question or problem.

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Final UI

Main UI

The final UI of Ulule Campus follows simple but clear principles:

• Keeping it simple as it is a support website dedicated to learning and productivity
• Provide easy navigation through themes and content types with a clear color code
• Be compliant with our design system as well as other support websites 

We had to build a lot of prototypes to make this UI as clear and simple as possible and in the end reached a good compromise between readability, ease of use and user friendly design.

Interactivity

Of course we also developed a mobile version and interactive components with all of their states to ease development.

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Follow UP

After completing the design of Ulule Campus we shared it with our team and a few project creators. Everybody was very enthusiastic about it, knowing that it will be helpful when providing clear information and saving time.

Campus is still in development but we still have users asking when it will be available. We are confident that its release will really help creators make better projects and be more independent and confident while launching their campaign.