Tekniksprånget is a project run by Kungliga Ingenjörsvetenskaps-akademien (IVA). According to them there's several surveys that show there is still a great shortage of engineers. So the aim with the program is to attract more young people to higher technical educations
Tekniksprånget is one of the most popular internship programs. But their previous website was truly outdated and they were in desperate need of an upgrade. Not just visually but also technically.
But to be sure what the users actually wanted, we conducted a comprehensive prestudy for this project. Sure we could have just upgraded their platform and redesign with ease – but sometimes even if things doesn't look good, some users might find it practical.
In the prestudy we had workshops with customer, user survey and interviews with users from different target groups. From the insights we gathered we created user descriptions (a light version of personas) and could from there decide which direction to go.
My role
I was the only designer in this project and as a UX and UI designer I played a big part through out the whole project. Me and a colleague created the questions for the survey and the user interviews, and conducted those together.
From the gathered insights and user description we had created, I made a design proposal – which the customer immediately approved. "This is so nice I am gonna cry!" was one of the comments I received.
Another great thing about this project was their graphic manual, the colors being my own favourites (purple, yellow, etc) made it even more fun to work with.
My work then continued with designing several page types for mobile and desktop, and some things inbetween. I had daily dialogue with developers to ensure they had everything they needed, and also helped them out by inspecting the website and giving them the correct code for things – as I've also worked a lot with HTML and advanced CSS.
When the design was done and approved, I continued helping the developers by giving feedback, answering questions and also tested out the website as an editor on the platform.
The biggest challenge for me
Before this project, I had worked with designing and building hundreds of websites, but where the customer didn't have the ability to edit themselves. And that was great – because when they needed to change things – an experienced web designer did the changes (usually me).
But what I learnt here is that when editors get the ability to change things themselves, things might not look as intended. It's also way more complicated to build things on a platform where the editor has a lot of freedom and still make the end result look great.
It's difficult to see the technology behind everything, but the editors have an easy to use platform where the interface along with components are custom built. For me as a designer, I still see things that should be adjusted, but considering what they had before, it's much better now despite those things.
