Title: UI/UX Designer
Duration: May 1st, 2020 - March 12th, 2021
Team Director: Wesley Hsu
Tools: Sketch, Figma, WordPress, Invision, Adobe Creative Suite, Asana
Robolink was established in 2012 in San Diego, California to encourage students to engage with STEM. They create fun and approachable robotics kits that bring computer science to life and teach real industry competency. They’re also at the cutting edge of technology! They were the first to make a programmable educational drone as well as a self-driving car kit that teaches artificial intelligence.
Background
In 2020, I joined Robolink as a UI/UX Designer right before I graduated from UCSD. I worked closely with the vice president, engineers, and course instructors to revamp the online learning platform and reimagine the users’ journey throughout the main website to improve the remote learning experience and gain more potential customers during the pandemic period. We aim to build a brand-new ecosystem to serve our parents, young children, and instructors with a better guiding, learning, and teaching experience.
Project 1 - Zumi Dashboard Design
Zumi, a self-driving artificial intelligence robot car kit, provides a rich and more tangible learning experience for children and adults of all ages. Zumi has a dashboard platform providing a series of onboarding processes and pre-programmed exploring modes to guide and lead users to get to know her.
Problem:
How could we provide a more attractive and easy-to-understand mode to lead further interest in Zumi? How can we guide users to get familiar with Zumi without many words of explanation?
Solution:
The design team decided to take advantage of the existing hardware and take it further to develop a more friendly interactive learning experience under a new mode called Explore Mode. We aimed to help users get interested, learn, and then explore Zumi by maximizing human nature curiosity. Under this mode, I took advantage of existing hardware and pre-made function algorithms to allow children to interact with their friends, and family members through Zumi. In this situation, the children will not only be able to play with Zumi as a regular learning toy, but also include their parents in the playing and interacting cycle. Therefore, the family members get a chance to interact with their children’s toys and have more potential to learn the logic and reason behind this.
Project 2 - Website Revamp, Design and Development
Task 1:
I mapped out the site map to draw a clear user journey map in front of the overall team members. The site map is vital to the company’s next step plan and future development. The course development and design teams worked closely together to find out existing problems and generate new content to maintain up-to-date learning materials for children in the AI field and programming learning at an early age.
Task 2:
Besides managing the existing content, I actively participate in all website content design and development aspects. We gained insights from the community and took action to solve the problem we noticed. For instance, I managed and collected all product information and generated them on a single page to display all crucial links and proper information that our stakeholders need in one place.
Task 3:
I also took the lead in designing the user sign-in and sign-up process on Robolink Basecamp to clearly divide our users into three categories - teachers, students, and parents. This process will help the team generate more target-oriented content for each group and provide a more bounded communication environment for each type of user when they meet in life.
Task 4:
I participated in the newly released product - CoDrone Mini early-stage user experience development, which has also been included in the Robolink Basecamp learning content. By providing proper step-to-step information along with possible problems the remote students may meet, I was able to deliver a clear, structured, and organized onboarding manual for all summer bootcamp students. After that, I took this template and generalized the content to make it fit a larger group of users - general students/customers who own CoDrone Mini and would love to get started with it.
Summary
During the toughest time, the Roblink Inc. team survived all together as a united family. I, as a designer, delivered a clear interface design along with a united design style language throughout the whole system. As the major deliverable of the learning platform (Robolink Basecamp), my UI design and information system organization were able to help hundreds and thousands of students learn robotic coding and artificial intelligence on their computers, tablets, or even phones. The comprehensive consideration of different stakeholders on the learning website was able to clearly guide them to their desired