Design for Passion is a 9-week long design jam hosted by University of Washington’s Human Centered Design & Engineering Graduate Student Association. It is an opportunity for students to collaborate on a team while working on a sponsored or self-directed project with mentorship from an industry professional. I teamed up with 4 other designers to tackle a sponsored project with MASAMI.

MASAMI is a clean, premium haircare brand that strives to develop hair products that are hydrating for every hair type. Their secret hydrating ingredient is Mekabu seaweed that is sourced from the waters of northeast Japan.

➺ Data analytics to see where customers started to drop off during the customer journey so that we can know which sections to focus efforts on.
➺ User surveys to learn about how customers viewed MASAMI and if they had any feedback.
➺ Website Audit to get designers acquainted with the website and discover any potential problems.
➺ Competitive analysis to see how our competition uses design to drive sales and customer satisfication.

My task was redesigning the product page with one other partner. I specifically worked on optimizing the hierarchy of product information on the page using typography and layout, as well as including a size selector feature per the stakeholders' request. I also suggested a recommended products for you section on the product page.

To wrap up the project, we created documentation for the designs so that the clients could hire engineers to implement our designs.

Our design recommendations have been built and shipped, and are now live! It's exciting to see our work out in the real world, and being interacted on by real customers.

➺ Effective communication and a strong understanding of the project are crucial! I served as the liaison between the client and the designers. By ensuring I fully understood the client's expectations, it allowed me to translate those expectations into actionable weekly tasks for the design team.

➺ Finding a balance between everyone’s strengths and weaknesses is essential. As the project lead, I took the time to understand each team member’s individual strengths, weaknesses, and their expectations for this project cycle. While creating weekly tasks, I occasionally allowed designers to assign themselves, giving them the flexibility to choose projects they felt comfortable with or wanted to gain more experience in. At other times, I assigned tasks directly, taking into account their past work and aspirations to ensure I was also challenging them to explore new areas.
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➺ Ensure everything worked on the project is visible, organized, and accessible. Given the project's nature, my team often worked asynchronously due to varying commitments and team members living in different countries. From the beginning I established a Notion workspace and a Figma file for both the designers and the client, providing easy access to all documentation and project work in one centralized location.

When wrapping up with the project, the team discussed with the client that we would like to send out a post-survey, to the customers who filled out the initial survey, once the client finishes implementing our design changes. The team hopes to learn if there is an increased rating (scale of 1-5, 1 being poor, 5 being excellent) for the new overall visual design and layout, compared to its prior rating of 3.88.

We could also measure our impact by taking a look at the new conversion rates and seeing if there is business growth.