socialbee
We had the pleasure of working with socialbee, an NGO focused on the sustainable integration of refugees into the German labour market. We collaborated to bring their new digital platform to life, aimed at facilitating the process of welcoming refugees along their journey. Our partnership was so successful that we ended up redesigning their entire website.
my role
client
Timeframe
socialbee is a non-profit social business that creates opportunities everyday for Refugees in Germany, to give them the chance to integrate.
Together with my colleague, we designed entirely a new digital Platform, that will accompany and support users through their whole journey in settling down.
Despite the limited time to work on it, we translated complex ideas and features for both Desktop and Mobile, including their whole Design System, the Job research page and more.
“It’s been a great pleasure to work with the Goodpatch team so far. The result of their work has been really strong and their great way of working is really inspiring. I look forward to the continued collaboration.”
— Ramin, Marketing Manager
socialbee
We had the pleasure of working with socialbee, an NGO focused on the sustainable integration of refugees into the German labour market. We collaborated to bring their new digital platform to life, aimed at facilitating the process of welcoming refugees along their journey. Our partnership was so successful that we ended up redesigning their entire website.
my role
client
Timeframe
Context
socialbee is a non-profit social business that creates opportunities everyday for Refugees in Germany, to give them the chance to integrate.
Together with my colleague, we designed entirely a new digital Platform, that will accompany and support users through their whole journey in settling down.
Despite the limited time to work on it, we translated complex ideas and features for both Desktop and Mobile, including their whole Design System, the Job research page and more.
“It’s been a great pleasure to work with the Goodpatch team so far. The result of their work has been really strong and their great way of working is really inspiring. I look forward to the continued collaboration.”
— Ramin, Marketing Manager
Understanding of the platform
The client’s team briefed us about their vision of the Platform. It was clear that was important to deliver everything in a very tight time frame. The most important KPI for us was no stretch on budget and time, therefore we decided to cut out the process and relying on benchmarking, to find out what are the best practices in the field.
Who are we designing this for?
We received a great quantity of content, with a list of features and ideas, which we decided to address by starting with defining the type of users who will experience the Platform.
We identified 4 types: Refugees, Partners Organisation, Employers and also socialbee’s team. Understanding the User Types and their role was crucial, it allowed us to prioritise afterwards the long list of features our client had in mind.
However, since Refugees are our main users, we focused on them to design the platform and make their experience optimal. Here are some insights we gathered from our stakeholders that were focal points during our work:
Information Architecture
Along with my teammate, we jumped then into analysing the content we received from the client, to build the platform around it.
How to make the content relevant to the user without overwhelming it?
This question, coming from one of our insights, led our content analysis and division into groups, allowing us to prioritise the features.
The client initially commissioned us 4 pages only, but within the process and getting to know better their project and ideas, it was clear that the platform was much more complex. It became necessary to create a Sitemap, to make the structure more clear to us and to the client.
UI REFINEMENT
From Mid-Fi Wireframes...
to creating the Design System
After fully understanding the structure of the platform, the needs of the users and the customer, we went on to visualise these ideas in Figma. The socialbee brand is already established, with a fully functioning website. The best way to start was a brand audit: we collected all the current images of their website, colours, typography, type of photography, icons.
We asked ourselves, how far from the present website to go, while following the current CI guidelines?
Our goal and the customer's request was to follow their brand, but also to create something with a fresh touch. We started to design the Design System from scratch, which developed while working on scale on all the pages.
The client was so satisfied of the result, that commission us the redesign of the existing website with the new Design System.
The final designs
During the whole process we always have been collaborating and discussing our progress with the client and the developers team. Every part of the platform has been designed in a way that could be implemented easily by the development team, taking in account eventual possible limitations.
Use Case –– User is logged in and wants to search for jobs
NEXT STEPS & LEARNINGS
As this was a short-term project with limited budget and resources, our approach was to speed up the process, so we could not test the prototype adequately. The next steps, with more time available, will be to test it with the main users, the refugees, and iterate accordingly on the feedback gathered. Furthermore, having a more holistic view of socialbee's entire online presence (digital platform and website) from the start would certainly have been beneficial.
During the course of this project there was a great level of collaboration and communication with the client. It has been a great experience to work with such a motivated and inspiring team.
Looking forward to the final launch of the Platform and the new website, also completely redesigned from us!
