<Company> Catswork
<Role> Lead UIUX Designer and Graphic Designer
<Team> 2 Software Engineers, 2 Designers
<Tools> Adobe XD, Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator, HTML, CSS, Wordpress
Catswork aim to create end to end recruitment resources for students, ranging from networking tools to recruitment content. In the United States, networking is extremely serious, much more so than in Singapore. Students network with hundreds of people during the same period of time. Catswork aims to simplify that process. During my exchange in Northwestern University, I was hired as the Lead UIUX Designer for the team.
Catswork aims to make networking easier for students, so that more people can benefit from networking
My first task was to redesign the company logo and give the company its unique branding.
Here are my considerations:
Mismatched colours, awkward fonts, Strange capitalisation of W, W reminds people of Mathworks logo
I struggled to keep the cat element without making it look unprofessional. Through this process I realised that curves and straight edges make a lot of difference when it comes to brand building for a logo.
As I did not join the company from the very start, I missed out on the empathising part of designing, jobs to be done findings and so on. However, I did speak to a lot of students in Northwestern University, and found out that keeping track of their networks is indeed a problem. Students use alternatives, such as excel sheets, to keep track of their network and their respective to-dos (e.g. coffee chats, cold emails and so on), and it is a hassle. Here are the main problems faced by students
Our target user, who are university students, will first gain connections from LinkedIn or Networking sessions. They will then record down the new connection's information in our chrome extension. They are able to set reminders and to-dos for each connection as well. Lastly, the user can go to his web dashboard, where he can see all his connections in one glance and easily filter for more information.
As we were only building the MVP, the dashboard and chrome extension were relatively simple. However, the user experience has to be good as customer retention of early adopters is extremely important. As most students were using an excel sheet as an alternative, we mimicked the functionalities of excel so that users will find it easier to migrate to Catswork.
Through this quick paper iterations, I realised a few issues which I overlooked. Extensions are ultimately, different from apps. That means the experience should not be the same. One example will be the navigation bar. Usually, in apps, the navigation bar is at the bottom. However, as chrome extensions are part of chrome itself, the order which the eye navigates should naturally be from the top. That was a huge insight.
Unfortunately, i did not get a chance to iterate upon the user experience due to timeline limitations. Here's my main takeaway and area for improvements:
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