Milestone 2 – Science Fair

What is your project concept?

Our project concept revolves around creating holistic, centralized personal websites for upperclassmen college students and new graduates in a way that is easy and fast. 

Why is your value proposition statement correct (e.g., the research says so!)?

Our value proposition statement is that we are helping college students/new graduates create visual, holistic, centralized portrayals of themselves (skills, interests, past work, experiences, and projects) by helping them create a personal website. Our value proposition statement is correct because everyone we interviewed (all college students and new grads) who did not already have a personal website said that they would like to have their own personal website (even if they didn’t need one for work/finding a job). In addition, the majority of the people we interviewed who already had personal websites had unmet pain points with existing solutions that our project could help fill in the gaps for. For instance, the number one most commonly cited pain point was that it was time-consuming and difficult to create their personal website and they rarely update their personal website for those reasons. In addition, people mentioned that their existing personal website was solely for work purposes/finding a job and that they wished they could make their personal website be a more holistic portrayal of themselves, rather than just have it be work or professionally-focused. Therefore, we were able to validate the correctness of our value propositions statement with user interviews of college students and new graduates. 

What motivated your choices for the MVP?

From class, we learned that a good MVP has the least number of features that create value for your user. In other words, an MVP should contain the fewest number of features that creates the most value-add for your users. Another impact on our MVP choices was how technically feasible each feature would be to actually implement quickly. We had to take our own team’s skillset into account to figure out what was feasible to do right now for our MVP. With these two things in mind, we decided for our MVP to only include a few, key features. First of all, we need users to be able to create a new account/login to the StudioHub site in order to create/edit their personal website. Second of all, we need to include a feature to allow the user to add input into their personal website (documents, resume, files, images, embed links, etc) both for when they are initially creating their personal website and for when they want to edit their personal website. Within this “add input” feature, we would like to have a way to integrate with other apps like LinkedIn, Instagram, Medium, GitHub so that users can input a link to their GitHub profile, let’s say, and then they’re link will be embedded into their personal website page in the form of a visual thumbnail that contains their latest GitHub project, for example. Thirdly, we need to include a way to actually organize and visually represent all of their input onto their personal website page. Lastly, we want the user to be able to save their personal website as a draft and/or publish it so it can be live. A few features we plan to add after this initial MVP are: the ability to tag certain parts of your personal website and filter by those tags so that users can portray just their design projects or just their engineering projects on the page, for instance. Another “soon” feature will be allowing users to purchase their own domain name for their personal website. We came up with these features for the MVP by doing participatory roadmap user interviews and organizing our features into soon, later, and much later categories based on the value-add/importance to the user and the feasibility of building the feature on the technical side. 

What is the goal of the project; how are users’ lives changed by your product?

The goal of the project is to initially provide an easier, faster alternative to creating a personal website that also gives users more flexibility in being able to show whatever they want, whenever they want to whoever they want by being able to tag and filter their personal website. The eventual goal of this project is to be a LinkedIn-type platform where there are companies and recruiters on the platform, as well as employees or potential employees. Users will be able to find companies/people they’re interested in, message people, and find and secure jobs through the platform. Users’ lives are changed by our product because they are now able to portray their whole selves in a digital manner easier and faster than they were able to before. They will more easily be able to navigate various interests by being able to tag/filter their page to be the work that is relevant to whatever opportunity they are going after. They will be more easily able to find a job and be found by recruiters who think they would be a good fit culturally and skills-wise for job opportunities. 

What assumptions are you still worried about?

We are still worried about the assumption that the future of work will value the holistic individual more so than it does today. We are also worried about the assumption that users will want a personal website even if they do not “need” it for job purposes. Although we have conducted user interviews and people have verbally validated these assumptions for us, it is one thing to say something and another to actually do it or act on it when the time comes. In other words, in theory, most of our target audience would want a personal website (at least according to everyone we talked to), but in practice, will people actually go out of their way to make a personal website if they have access to our product and services? This is where the experience prototyping tests come into play and help us validate our assumptions further than just verbal validations from user interviews. 

What experience prototypes have we done, and why? How did they turn out?

For our experience prototypes, our team conducted a “Wizard of Oz” prototype. Essentially, we had each user fill out a “user profile” (a Google form) where we got their name, profile photo, and links to their LinkedIn, GitHub, Figma, and any other links that were relevant to them. We also conducted a short two-minute user interview where we asked them about their passions, projects, and past experiences. We then used a word map generator to find the overlapping words they used to describe them. Using these words, their user profile info, and relevant links, we physically made them a Figma UI mockup of the StudioHub profile page. Then we showed them what we made and asked them if they wanted their StudioHub page link shared with them. 

Are there experience prototypes that you may need to build next?

An experience prototype we plan to make in the future, is sharing with the user an editable version of their StudioHub profile page. Our prototype would track how often they opened up the link, how often they would check it, and how often they would make edits. This will test if having an easy to make portfolio builder will lead to consistent use.

How viable is our product as far as we know, with the assumptions that we currently have and the experience prototypes we have done?

From our initial experience prototype, we found that the least amount of work they did, the more they liked the product. Even something as simple as asking for a short one-sentence bio would prevent users from continuing to build their profile. Our product needs to be well built so that it can easily and efficiently build a portfolio with minimal work from the user. Therefore, we need to do some more testing to see if this is viable to build to keep the user experience simple. 

We would like advice on…

Technical ideas and expertise on how to build a way for users to not only make portfolios easier, but also know what to put on their portfolios.

Here is a link to all of our materials (VPC, BMC, etc.): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1vSkIqc_Oarj1fMWCTrC3-eurcsPeqQ8KFjyiwniL6fQ/edit?usp=sharing