Communiti
Cutting through the noise for early career tech professionals who are drowning in resources and starving for direction.
Role
UX Designer (Project Lead)
Team
2 Designers
Timeline
4 Weeks
Tools
Figma, Jira, Miro, Confluence
01- The Problem
There Is No Shortage of Information. That Is the Problem.
New tech graduates and career transitioners face a counterintuitive challenge: too much of everything. There are courses, newsletters, YouTube channels, Slack groups, subreddits, bootcamp alumni networks, and a new platform launching every other week promising to be the one that finally makes it click.
None of it is organized around the person trying to use it. The result is a specific kind of overwhelm that feels like failure, even when someone is putting in real effort. They are not behind because they are not trying. They are behind because nothing is telling them where to start.
Communiti was designed to fix that. Not by adding more content, but by making the right content findable, saveable, and actually worth coming back to.
02- Discovery
What We Heard From Real People
We interviewed recent graduates from universities and tech bootcamps to understand their day to day experience of trying to stay current and informed. The conversations surfaced a pattern that showed up consistently across backgrounds and experience levels.
People were not confused about what they wanted. They knew exactly what a good experience would feel like. What they could not find was a platform that delivered it.
Want
Curated, simple, and up to date content that does not require a full evening to get through.
Need
Resources that respect their time. Long form content and irrelevant material was a consistent dealbreaker.
Pain
Feeling lost inside the sheer volume of information available online, with no clear signal about where to begin.
Goal
Confidence that they are starting in the right place, building the right skills, moving in the right direction.
03- Define
Click To View
Getting Specific About Who We Were Designing For
Research is only useful if it leads somewhere concrete. We distilled everything we heard into a persona that kept our design decisions honest throughout the project.
Click To View
Meet Dianne
Dianne represents early career tech professionals transitioning out of bootcamps and into their first industry roles. She is tech savvy, motivated, and genuinely collaborative. She is not disengaged from learning. She is disengaged from platforms that make learning feel like homework.
Her challenges are specific: limited professional experience, knowledge gaps she cannot always name, and an information environment that gives her volume instead of direction. What she needs is a space that curates for her, helps her organize what she finds, and connects her to a community that understands where she is in the journey.
"Dianne is motivated but unsure where to start. That is a design problem, not a personal one."
That reframe mattered for how we approached the solution. The goal was not to motivate Dianne. She already had motivation. The goal was to give her a starting point she could actually trust.
Information Overload: Too many platforms, formats, and voices with no way to filter for what actually applies to her situation.
No Organization: Saving content to browser bookmarks or notes apps meant it was effectively gone. Out of context, hard to find, rarely revisited.
No Structure: Without a learning path, every session felt like starting from scratch. Progress was invisible.
Isolation: Navigating a career transition alone, without community, amplifies every moment of uncertainty.
04- Ideate
Designing for Confidence, Not Just Convenience
Every feature we designed had to answer one question: Does this make Dianne feel more capable and more in control? Convenience without confidence is just noise with better UX.
01- Book marking
Save content in the moment without breaking the reading flow. Simple, fast, and actually retrievable later.
02- Folder & Stack Organizing
Organize saved content by topic or interest area so returning to it feels intentional rather than accidental.
03- Category Following
Let users shape their own feed by following categories that match where they are in their career, not a generic algorithm.
04- Recommendation Algorithm
Planned for a future iteration. Personalized content delivery based on behavior over time, once the core experience is proven.
Prioritization: MoSCoW Framework
Not everything makes it into the first build. We used MoSCoW prioritization to stay focused on what would deliver the most value without overextending the scope.
Priority Features
Basic bookmarking and the ability to save content IDs. The foundation on which everything else is built.
Must Do
Folder organization and bookmark interactions. Transforms saving into a usable system.
Could Do
Filtering, quizzes, content summaries, and time tracking. High value but not blocking for launch.
Should Do
Automatic content scraping or a full recommendation engine at this stage. Scoped out to protect core quality.
Won’t Do
05- Validate
Testing With 13 Participants
We ran usability testing focused on the three core behaviors the platform was built around: bookmarking content, saving resources, and discovering new material. Thirteen participants put the prototype through its paces.
Bookmarking, Saving, and Content Discovery
13 Participants
69%
Completion Rate
Flow
Participants
The concept landed. Users understood what the platform was trying to do and why. Where it broke down was in visibility: bookmarking and favoriting features were present, but not prominent enough to get used naturally. Users were not ignoring them on purpose. They just were not seeing them.
"The biggest issue was not that people did not want to save content. It was that the feature to do it was not loud enough to catch them in the moment."
What We Changed
We increased the visual prominence of bookmarking and favoriting so they could not be missed mid scroll. The next phase involves building out microinteractions, hover states, and animations that make saving feel satisfying rather than mechanical. A follow up round of testing is planned to validate those improvements and push that completion rate up.
06- What I Took Away
The Assumption That Was Wrong
Going into this project, the assumption was that the core challenge was content discovery. Users could not find good material, so we built a better search experience, and the problem went away.
Research corrected that quickly. Users were finding content just fine. The real problem was what happened next: it disappeared. Browser bookmarks, scattered notes, saved posts in apps they barely opened. The discovery experience was functional enough. The organization's experience was broken.
That shift changed everything about what we built. The most impactful features ended up being the least glamorous ones: saving, stacking, and categorizing—the infrastructure of learning, not the learning itself.
It is a reminder I carry into every project now. The problem users describe is not always the problem worth solving. Sometimes you have to listen past the first answer.