AMPD Student Talent Platform
Overview
Client: YU's AMPD
Duration: Two Months
Role: Lead Product Designer
The Challenge
AMPD aimed to create a platform that would make student talent discoverable, appealing, and connected to the curriculum and the entire AMPD community. The primary goals were to enable students to create profiles, share their work with creative industries, and connect with alumni, professionals, and potential employers.
A persona and scenario were created that illustrated the optimal experience using Pablo Stanley's Open Peeps
Objectives
Discoverable
Ensure student portfolios are easily discoverable by potential employers and collaborators.
Appealing
Design portfolios that are visually appealing and engaging.
Connected
Integrate the platform with the curriculum and the broader AMPD community.
Workshop Day 1
Discover Opportunities
Goal Setting
The first major decision was to align the team on a shared, optimistic goal, which served as our “North Star” during the workshop and beyond.
Long-Term Goal
Make student talent discoverable so that they are selected for opportunities, and their portfolios are appealing to potential students and connected to the curriculum and the whole AMPD community.
Purpose
We exist to enable AMPD students to create a profile and share their work with creative industries and associated communities of their chosen career path
We do this for our current students, future students, alumni, and employers
We do this by building an accessible, consolidated, comprehensive, engaging, scalable, and sustainable platform
Select stickies written by stakeholders that culminated into the Purpose Statement
Guiding Principles
Cultivate awareness and meaningful access to the platform.
Connect with alumni, creative professionals, and external partners to generate excitement and enthusiasm.
Ensure sustainability in terms of resources, simplicity of design, access, and maintenance.
Validation Questions
To ensure we were on track, we defined critical questions:
Can we get enough buy-in to deliver a comprehensive platform?
Can we get students to engage with the platform?
Can we afford to build this?
Workshop Day 2
Find Inspiration
Revisiting Goals and Questions
We revisited our long-term goal and critical questions to bring clarity and create a more elegant long-term goal.
Updated Long-Term Goal
Make student talent discoverable by potential employers and future students through a framework that serves the needs of specific disciplines and the AMPD community as a whole.
Lightning Demos
We looked at solution examples from other industries to find inspiration. We generated a heat map to indicate the most interesting ideas and voted for the most promising ones. One main idea was selected with two supplemental moments from other ideas.
Workshop Day 3
Generate Ideas and Make a Plan
Solution Ideas
Each participant created a mass of ideas for experiments to solve organizational, business, or product challenges. All ideas were anonymous, and participants gave each a catchy title. We generated 16 ideas and planned to select our favorites and stitch them together into a roadmap for future iterations and workshops.
Outcomes
Prototype Development
Developed a prototype based on the selected ideas.
User Testing
Conducted user testing to validate the prototype.
Feedback Integration
Integrated feedback to refine the platform.
Launch Plan
Created a roadmap for future iterations and workshops.
Conclusion
The AMPD Student Talent Platform project was a collaborative effort that involved extensive research, ideation, and validation. The workshops helped align the team on a shared goal and generated innovative solutions to make student talent discoverable, appealing, and connected. The project is set to significantly enhance the visibility and engagement of AMPD students within the creative industry.
