Diddy ‘The Excellence Program’
Product Design, Branding
Sean Love Combs and Endeavor teamed up to empower, educate, and help employ the next generation of entertainment industry leaders. The Excellence Program is open to anyone, anywhere looking to break into the industry.
Research & Discovery
To fully understand the product we were building we set out to undertake in-depth user research. Doing so enabled us to build a user centric environment for our audience.
My Role
I served as the lead designer on this project. I had the joy of working closely with UXR in defining and exploring the problem space as well as working hand in hand with engineering to build a viable solution.
The Vision
Our vision is to inspire & enrich a new generation entering the workforce in an environment of deep economic, social and environmental uncertainty.
Hypothesis
The Excellence Program was developed to create opportunity for individuals who historically have not had exposure or connections to the sports, entertainment, and fashion industries.
User interviews - What we heard
To dive deeper into the problem space and gather valuable insights we set out to interview over 30 people within our target segment of 18-25 year olds starting out in their career journeys.
“The biggest problem I’ve had is that what I learned in college was more creative and theoretical, not applicable skills to my job.”
— Caroline M., Young Workforce
“It was hard to find an online course that showed the skills being taught actually implemented in real life.”
- John G., E-Learner
“There’s so much information out there on what you could be doing that it’s never clear what your next step should actually be.”
— Liz C., Entrepreneur
“It feels like it’s all about who you know in the industry. It’s hard to break ground without having those connections”
-Jessica T., Recent College Graduate
Affinity Map
The next phase was to distill all the data gathered from the interviews and create an Affinity Map in order for us organize the information into groups. Typically I would be inserting a beautiful image with post-it notes against a whiteboard here, however, we did this remotely…!
User Persona
At this point in the discovery phase, with the all the gathered insights I was able to create a realistic representation of our key audience segment. The user persona helped the entire team align and re-align with the problem space, expectations, concerns, motivations behind the product strategy.
Problem Statement
Maggie is starting her career in a time of unprecedented uncertainty within society and one in which traditional education paths don’t provide the adequate skills and information to adapt to an ever changing workforce. But she, like her peers, are not sitting by idly. She is always seeking out expert knowledge to learn new skills, develop her mindset, all the while growing her network.
How might we…
Make discovering a new online course as easy as liking an Instagram post…
Help busy, driven people push their career development in a compelling manner.
Connect like-minded people to learn and adapt to an ever changing world, together.
Empower people to learn at their own pace from industry leaders/experts via engaging online learning.
Create useful courses from entertaining teachers.
Facilitate relationships between driven people while helping them develop skills to take their careers to the next level.
Make learning easy, entertaining and affordable.
Create a sense of community within remote online courses.
Information Architecture
In order for me to fully understand what the optimal user experience for this platform could look like I built a happy path for our users’ journey. This also helped me build out prototypes to test and align our thinking with the business needs of our stakeholders.
