Marble Collective Profile Redesign

Elevating Women and Nonbinary Leaders' Experiences

I worked in a team of 4 (my teammates: Mima, Makena, and Ola) to redesign Marble Collective's Profile Page for Featured Members. When redesigning Marble Collective's Profile Page for Featured Members, the goal was to create a better way for users to see Featured Members' relevant information and media recommendations. The current Profile Page had certain elements, like the biography and brand statement, taking up too much vertical space, which required users to scroll for a long time to find information about a Featured Member's past work and experiences.

Project type

Profile page redesign for a networking platform for women and nonbinary professionals

Tools

Figma, Google Suite

Timeline

November 2024 - December 2024, 3 week sprint

Role(s)

UX/UI Designer - Research, Synthesis, Ideation, Wireframing, Visual Design, Prototyping

Teammates

Shamima Khan

Makena Kigunda

Ola Pater

Overview of Marble Collective

Marble Collective is a professional platform for prominent women and nonbinary leaders to share their work and media recommendations with one another and their community. Most notably, these leaders can make a centralized profile of all their work and past experiences, whether professional or personal, on Marble Collective.

Note on Inclusivity Inquiry

Since Marble Collective is marketed as a platform for women leaders, I brought up the question of whether prominent nonbinary leaders would be welcome to use the platform.

Whenever spaces are designated as “all-women” or “all-men,” such terms enforce the gender binary and inherently exclude people who don’t fall under the gender binary.

Even if a space includes “women and nonbinary people,” grouping nonbinary people together with women may carry the notion that nonbinary people are “women lite.” More often than not, nonbinary people are added as an afterthought and every nonbinary person is going to have a different answer on whether or not they would feel comfortable in going into those spaces.

Our team's design discussions around this topic eventually led us to rebrand Marble Collective as a platform for women and nonbinary leaders in the final stage of the project.

Meeting Our Client - Co-founder Kristin Thomas

Our client Kristin Thomas, co-founder of Marble Collective, provided us with a project brief. Her main task for our team was to redesign the About page (later renamed to Profile page, as detailed later on), which was Marble’s profile page for the Mavens (prominent women and nonbinary leaders, later renamed to Featured Members) to put their work experience, biographies, links, and media recommendations.

We scheduled a meeting with Kristin shortly after reading over the brief together to ask clarifying questions and gather more specific information about the deliverables she wanted. Alongside a redesigned About page, she gave us some additions she wanted to see in the About page:

Q&A Section: a centralized page for public questions and answers given by the Featured Member

Integration of an AI avatar of the Featured Member to directly speak to users who visited their page

In this meeting, she also clarified that prominent nonbinary leaders would be welcome to make profiles and be Featured Members on Marble Collective as well.

Heuristics Analysis of Existing Site

We proceeded to do our individual preliminary research on the existing Marble Collective website and competitors.

For my research, I visited the Marble Collective website to familiarize myself with the existing layout and information architecture and evaluate its performance. In the process, I conducted a heuristics analysis on the whole site and individual pages.

The biggest pain point was that the site’s loading time was extremely slow to the point I pressed buttons multiple times, thinking that my first press didn’t register.

Focusing in on the About page, I noticed that the profile picture took up a lot of space on the page, leaving barely any room for the member’s basic info on the left side of the page. Then the brand statement and biography took up too much vertical space, to the point that I had to scroll down for a long time before I could see a list of the member’s jobs and accomplishments.

User Interviews - Audience Members

In order to better improve users’ experiences with Marble Collective as a platform, we decided to interview people from two different user groups: prominent women and nonbinary people who would qualify as “Featured Members” on Marble Collective and the Audience Members who would be viewing Featured Members’ profiles.

I reached out to and interviewed 2 people from the Audience Member demographic, a nonbinary law student and a female game UX/UI designer. I asked them about their experiences with finding and following creators they look up to.

We later came back together as a team to synthesize the data from our interviews and identified two personas from the Audience Members, one who is more focused on following specific people over time and the other who mainly follows topics and doesn’t stick to one person or platform.

Focusing Our Design

Since we had developed 3 different user personas who had different motivations for wanting to use Marble Collective, we had to narrow down which persona we would be building our redesign for that also still provided value to the other personas.

Below is a Cartesian plot we created together to visualize where each user persona fell based on how they followed people or topics and how they would use a profile page. Then we determined which needs the current About page fulfilled (“Current”) and which needs we wanted our new About page to fulfill (“Goal”).

Sketching and Lo-Fi Wireframes

Having achieved alignment on making the About page focused more on information about a Featured Member’s experiences, our team went into sketching possible layouts for the About page.

As part of the sketching process, we all did a variation of a card sort, as proposed by Mima, to see where we all would sort our new About page’s items on the site so we could use those to inform formatting.

Design add-ons based on Kristin’s requests and our research:

Q&A Section: a centralized page for public questions and answers given by the Featured Member
My Path: a Featured Member’s visual timeline of their personal and career journeys
CTA (Call to Action): Follow capabilities, “Book Me” button, DM capability for Featured Members

See our ideation below:

Usability Testing and Nomenclature

After creating lo-fi wireframes, we conducted usability tests on the clarity and ease of navigation on the new About page.

Overall, users reported easy navigation on the Featured Member’s profile. There were a couple of points of confusion on the nomenclature:

Users initially not knowing what “Collection” referred to and having difficulty in deciphering the distinction between different pages

Users not knowing what “Maven” (the previous term for Featured Member) meant and having to look it up

As a result, we implemented nomenclature changes in our hi-fi prototype:

About (page) to Profile (page)
Maven to Featured Member
Collection and Portfolio to My Work
Library to My Library

Hi-Fi Prototype

Taking all our findings from our usability tests on our lo-fi prototype, we created a profile page that had all basic relevant information at the top and a side menu that led to separate timeline, work, library, and Q&A sections. We also presented the Featured Member’s experience in a more concise way that took advantage of the previous empty horizontal space.

Soojung Choi