Crowdsourcing Ideas on
social good
Type: Web/Service
ROLE: Co-Founder, UX
DURATION: 1.5 years
Tool: AE,AI,Figma,Maze
What is Openhive
Open Hive is an open platform that encourages the community to collect crowd intelligence on social innovation issues.
Openhive is trusted by over 1000 users
Here are part of our honored partners including universities, educational institutions, NGOs, co-working spaces, and research labs.
The layout is designed to encourage new users to navigate through the webpage, The hero page explain"who we are" and engage users to join us by "join challenge" and "create challenge"
Following contents including：
1. join our trending challenge
2. sign up for the upcoming event
3. explore our design toolkit
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In our challenge page, we listed existing and upcoming social innovation challenges.
Each card component has a tittle, category, tag, and design phase.
Users could find their interested topic by using the filter/search bar or just wandering around this page.
Current challenge topics include smart home, energy-saving apps, reuse coffee grounds...
Design toolkit is a library showcasing design methodology and design tools.
The intention is to use an easy and fun way to equip organizations and teams with a means for dealing with ambiguous and complicated problems.
We will provide design tools such as napkin sketches, journey maps, and sandbox games.
Our community members are encouraged to create their tools or share their design insights with the community.
Design Impact
After launching the platfom, we attracted over 1,000 active users. With 7,000 page views.
Gold Award @ Daimler Design Award
Our project won the Gold Award in the service design spectrum.
During the submission period of three months, more than 2,000 submittals were received from students from mainland China, Taiwan, Germany, and Italy.
The competition is co-sponsored by the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries and the Daimler Group.
Project Timeline:
Design the platform and conducted 3 real life challenges to validate design in 6 months.
In 2022, I worked with one of the core members Jiaxin Liu to revisit our design and update the UI with Figma.
My Role as Co-founder & Founding UX designer in Openhive:
-Co-founder of Openhive.
-Led end-to-end design circle. Later expand the team from 4 to 10+ volunteers to launch the platform in 3 months.
-Conducted pilot campaign with 200 + stakeholders.
01. Empower the community with design thinking
⦾ Our platform will empower the community with design thinking and tools to generate ideas and viable solutions for potential implementations.
02. Challenge fixed design process, Design for the real wrold
⦾ Critique current design methodologies and the purpose of a new system that allows people to create projects without a design background.
⦾ Design for the real world: Organized real-life challenges focused on daily sustainable issues.
⦾ Design and operate the platform to attract users to join our real-life challenges. Validate the openhive design process by massive user testing at each proposed phase.
Inclusive Interview:
Experts who volunteer to join Openhive as advisory board member
Empathize with the targeted users and define the user problems
Kick-off Workshops: Define user motivations & painpoints during design process.
1 Sharing Case Studies
2 Journey Map & Painpoints
3 Cart Sorting for Openhive
Group 1: 20 High School Students
Group 2: 7 NGO-Bottle Dream core team
User Motivation: What makes people join those challenges?
Different function ( phase ) has its unique drive to participants. There are four typical user groups, including seeker, solver, voter and funder. They are drawn those drivers which means they may spend more efforts on this platform.
User Pain Points
Reorganized the sticker notes gathered from workshops and interviews.
01: Competitive Analysis - Conducted research on existing open innovation platforms to validate the market
The three major needs are : learn new skills, meet different people, and do good things together.
Case Study: Understanding the operation structure and design process by drawing the Site Maps and System Maps.
Selected cases focused on engaging community members to develop ideas at multiple design phases.
Case Study 01 : OpenIDEO
OpenIDEO—IDEO’s open innovation practice—enables people worldwide to come together and build solutions for today's toughest societal problems. Online and around the globe.
Case Study 02 : Arup Foresight
Arup Foresight is a multi-disciplinary team of consultants and designers that can help our clients understand change, identify emerging opportunities and future-proof their business.
What we learnt from case study:
Define relationshop between interaction and social impact with coordination system
Study the relationship between team diversity and ideation rate by using the metric chart
The platform with a higher trait of openness brings more social impact and diversity yet results in additional functionality for quality control.
Both of the platforms show the trend that local meetup is more effective than online communication.
In addition, the average professional degree of Arup is relatively higher than openIDEO, while OpenIDEO has more social impact/explosure than Arup
Big-Picture Storyboard
"Have you ever come up with a brilliant idea, but never make it happen?"
Step by Step: Openhive Operation Diagram
1 Kick-off
Publish the "Monthly Design Issue"， and ask 10 related questions for community members to raise their curiosity.
2 Inspiration
Publish the "Challenge Brief" and introduce relevant case studies. Community members choose to join the brainstorming session for concept ideas.
3 Conception
Challenge teams are required to submit their "Conceptual Ideas" online. The expert panel will provide guidance and criticism based on the Openhive guidebook.
4 Solution
Challenge teams start prototyping. Openhive provides relevant resources and design tools based on their needs.
5 Implementation
OpenHive will empower the challenge team with needed design skills and help them match the needed professionals. Besides we will connect resources to the project team to help implement solutions.
6 Impact
After the "Implementation", Openhive will collect the solutions/experiences／feedback of this challenge, and publish them on the platform to promote the platform and inspire more ideas.
Meet Openhive Work Bees (User & Stakeholder)
Information Architecture: Define design opportunities
The website itself has a great variety of user types, and each of the types could shift to another role based on their interests and project needs. To help users to find targeted information, and accomplish tasks effectively, I mapped the information architecture. Among them, I used Blue to identify the design opportunities that are unique from the mainstream competing products on the market.
Design opportunities:
1.Openhive, each phase is linked with a certain tab that direct users to their needed resources.
2.Toolkit will empower the community with design thinking and technique to build up their ideas.
3.Openhive has the potential as a socail platform that contribute to local community event.
Utilize webpage to guide the design process
In this portfolio project, we showed two selected user flows focused on"Find the Challenge" and"Join the Challenge" to explain how Openhive plan to engage community members to develop their ideas from 0 to N.
Lo-Fidelity Mockup: From Home Page to Join the Challenge
User Engagement is the key indicator to show whether our platform success or not. So we studied user flows while we conducted lo-fidelity mockups. In this task, we showed the user the completed journey about "Join the Challenge". The Red line is for Challenge Participants who have consistent input in the selected challenge. The yellow and Blue lines are for people that have an interest and the willingness to explore the webpage. The black line means organizational flow including new user registration and sign-in.
Synthesizing usability study results: Simplified User Flow
In this design iteration, we only shows challenge participant' flow starts from home page to challenge page, and then they are required to add comments or vote on their interested ideas.
Hotspot Diagram: Analyzing user journey on the website
We invited 5 users for usability task, and defines KPI metric on User error rates and Drop-off rates.
Home Page Iteration
Challenge Page Iteration
Toolkit Page Iteration
High-Fidelity Mockups - Challenge Pages
Reuse of Coffee Ground
After launching the Openhive design process with website, we tested the design process by facilitating several real life challenges.
Here we selected “Coffee on the ground” which runs the full design process to test each function.
Project Overview:
Design:
01 Openhive Service Design System
02 iOS & Web UIUX design
03 Toolkits for online event and local design workshops
04 Facilitate real challenges through Openhive
Validate:
01 Test idea conversion rate at each proposed design process through various online platforms and local community workshops.
02 Iterate design based on the user feedback.
Project Impact:
Phases that we open to the public for ideas/resources/suggestions.
Takeaways: Validate Assumptions through real life challenge
Through the large-scale user research conducted in the early stage, we realized that this would be a relatively complicated project in terms of its scale, workload, design approach, and innovation level.
With the real-life challenge, we got the chance to validate previous assumptions and refine the information openness at each phase to control the quality of solutions. We also refined the open innovation design process of our platform.
If we have more time, we would add an online shop to showcase the product people made through openhive.
Special thanks to Jiaxin Liu, who was willing to revisit this design after 5 years.
