The Collective Studio

The Collective Studio is a Discord community server that hosts remote design sprints monthly for UX design students or those transitioning to UX design.

The Collective Studio started in September 2020 with 70 members and reach over 600 members by March 2020. More visitors every week were discovering The Collective Studio through different design communities were discovering and wanting to participate in our remote sprint workshops, which no other community server was doing.

Some of the problems we noticed when running the community was a experience gap amongst UX design students coming from bootcamps. There is a lack of smooth transition into securing employment amongst new UX designers or those transitioning from other fields.

Still many designers who are new to the concept of design thinking and design sprints. Students had a lack of creative spaces for collaboration amongst other designers in-between studying and employment.

The UX Design industry also presents a diversity problem which is slow to change. Visible minorities, Non-binary and women designers of color were not employed or given equal chances to succeed as white designers. Racial bias amongst recruiters and HR departments still exist despite corporations like Google and Facebook attempting to change their hiring practices.

Goals/Requirements: Some of the goals & requirements to aim for the community server are: • Invite professionals to host webinars with us • Reach out and invite our current partners and past speakers to share their UX insights • Rebrand the organization for new year, new start

Process 🛣

The steps to accomplish the goals and requirements are user research, including reviewing the Discord analytics, Hot Jar, social media, and event management accounts. I reach out to professionals who follow our social media and ask to host webinars with us. I also reach out to professionals who has previous experience in hosting webinars and are familiar with Discord.

We believe having an official website, communicate with members, and host events through Discord will drive engagement with a wider and global audience. We hope to attract further partnership in the long term to offer more skills and workshops to help new students get their first jobs, especially amongst minority groups.

Results 🎁

As a result, our community server continues to grow quickly. We reach past 3k+ members in less than 2 years. We predict to reach 10k+ members by the end of 2024. By continue to organize webinars, design sprints, and communicate with our members, our members love to participate and connect with other aspiring UX designers.

Final outcome is pending as this project is on-going and long-term. So far, we learned many things in the process.

User need to know and what is expected of them before they commit. We commissioned Fedra to create a short 4 minute video to explain the process as a visual story. Content that is easy to digest and non-threatening to new designers with no experience.

Users are finding it difficult to attain a mentor. Thisis something our community has tried to resolve but isn’t very effective. We are aware of the complexity of mentorship and its level of motivation and commitment to keep it up. More research is needed in order to address and resolve this pain.

Our members are motivated to build their first case study and to get professional feedback. We will continue to collect feedback to improve our workshop events.