February 2025
Service Design
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During my UX Bootcamp experience at Georgia Tech, they assigned 6 major projects throughout the course: 3 individual projects and 3 group projects. The individual projects were precursors to the group projects. In essence, they seemed to be designed to prepare us to work with others as a strong, cohesive team.
My only experience working with others on projects like this involved working with a product owner, developers, senior researchers and student researchers so I was definitely curious to see how the group projects at Georgia Tech would go.
I tried to prepare as much as possible by taking advantage of breakout rooms during class and attending office hours to get a feel for people’s personalities in the cohort.
The first project was to: design and develop an app from scratch.
This project was largely unsuccessful in terms of scope and pace.
The first project was to: re-design a nonprofit organization’s website/digital functionalities they need to function.
See: Tallahassee Big Dog Rescue
The first project was to: design and develop an app or website using all skills learned in class: thorough research, design, testing, etc.
This project proved to be the most difficult.
I was part of a team of 4. One of the most challenging aspects of the entire course and its design was communication strengths and weaknesses to fellow group members. Since many were completely new to UX and didn’t have relevant/transferrable experience, it was hard to pool talents when said talents hadn’t even been identified.
This team consisted of myself, a developer completing the course through her company, a visual designer new to UX and someone entirely new to UX.
We spent a few hours brainstorming what we wanted to design or re-design. Some of the options included:
1. Redesigning a franchised bubble tea shop’s ordering system
2. Redesigning GasBuddy mobile application
3. Designing a system for staying in contact with the incarcerated
Since it had the strongest value proposition, we opted to redesign the GasBuddy mobile application. At the time (November 2021), gas prices were pretty high on top of car prices being some of the most inflated in history.
We started the bootcamp-style design process of defining the problem via research while also starting to think about visual inspiration. We interviewed multiple people each, pooled our responses and came to the conclusion that the app was suffering due to a lack of trust and the app pushing promotions, prizes and credit cards.
We started ideating solutions: ways that we could reorganize the app to still include valuable business opportunities (signing up for rewards, etc.) while also maintaining usability for an app that is supposed to be designed to use on the go.
This is where the problem started: we weren’t all on the same page about HOW to fix it specifically.
It was at this point that one of my team members strongly vocalized choosing an entirely different project altogether. It was a tense situation. Earlier in the program, our instructor shared ‘The Unstuck Map’ with us. It’s a map designed to keep teams aligned and on pace. I used it in this situation to recommend we revisit the problem and try to get more specific about writing a problem statement (this is what the map says to do!).
At this point, we decided that a specific and immediate corrective action we could make would be to redesign the navigation and include a more thorough onboarding experience (if desired).
*Our instructor did have to step in to talk individually with one of my group members.
Once we isolated a specific ‘feature’ to work on, things moved much more steadily and we ended up having time to focus on a few other visual changes that made the final product pretty decent.
I always use the 'Unstuck Map' now.
I keep it saved in a Figma file with a bunch of other easily accessible resources for when I feel stuck. I’ve used it in my own projects - even writing posts for my portfolio website blog. Thank you so much to Nikkel Blaase!
