Menace Collective

Menace Collective is a non-profit made up of local creatives - writers, journalists, and artists- who work together to raise the voices of those in marginalized communities who are under and/or misrepresented. They are dedicated to providing content that is relevant, inspiring content. They strive to make this content accessible across key demographics, including socioeconomic status and age.

📋 Summary

Overview

THE PROBLEM

They are still in the beginning stages of developing their content flow, editorial schedule, etc. They reached out to our team to help them ideate and create a platform for their creative content and to explore tools and layout approaches that would most effectively display the wide variety of content (written, visual, audio, etc.). They were also seeking some form of branding identity and possible recommendations for the best CMS platforms based on our designs.

THE TEAM

Hanna Helouin, Antonio Perez-Cajina, Caroline Hubbell, Alex Kim-Beck

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MY ROLE

Creating surveys, facilitating primary research sessions, creating mid-fidelity wireframes for mobile and desktop, creating high-fidelity wireframes for mobile, creating interactive prototype for mobile

TOOLS AND METHODS

Tools: Figma, Miro, Invision, Sketch, Google Suite, Bazaart

Methods: Stakeholder Interviews, Comparative Analysis, Surveys, User Interviews, Card Sorting, Tree Testing

Users

Content Creators

Artists and writers who, through the sharing of their artwork and narratives, act as the voice of marginalized communities, and prompt their audience to consider a wide range of social issues, take action, and lead collective liberation.
Content Curators

Weave together meaningful and impactful narratives and artworks from marginalized community members in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area in order to build and uniquely highlight the collective voice of the people who have predominantly been painted as the “menace” by dominant culture, with the goal of creating societal change.
Content Consumers

Greater Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area residents who are looking to access and consume alternative media (news, narratives, art) told from the perspective of marginalized community members rather than from dominant media sources.

🔍 Identify

Research

Stakeholder Interview

We met with the stakeholders in order to gain a better understanding of their needs, goals, and overall vision for Menace Collective. We used our findings to create a scope of work.

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Comparative Analysis

We conducted a comparative analysis to see what already existed in the space and what was missing.

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Surveys

Survey 1: Understanding users
Survey 2: Focused more on feedback for look and feel

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Card Sort & Tree Test

Deriving concepts from Menace Collective member’s published works, we assessed how users naturally group various types of content. The results of these tests were used to better provide navigation and taxonomy recommendations.

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Remote User Interviews

We conducted several remote interviews to gain additional insights on how users consume media, what makes content impactful to them, and how they feel their identities are represented on current media platforms.

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📝 Define

Data Synthesis

Research Findings

We reviewed all of the raw data that we collected and wrote out a summary of research findings.

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Feature Ideation

Based on our user research, we included these features in our design.

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🖌️Design

Early Design

Low-Fidelity Wireframes

Based on the new features proposed, I began creating low fidelity wireframes in sketch.

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Style Guide

Before increasing the fidelity of the wireframes, we created a style guide based on our research findings from Survey 2 (word association). We used accessible font sizes and a WCAG AAA-approved color palette.

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