The Practical Dev is an online community where programmers learn new coding trends, share ideas, and search for job opportunities. The site strives for this community to be the go-to for sharing and discovering great ideas, having constructive debates, and even to become a place where users can make new friends. Their main business goals included an increase in sign ups, account creations, returning users, and a higher active user rate.
Role: UX Designer; Researcher
Research & Discovery
The company began as a Twitter account. We wanted to learn more about their original competitors - the platforms that influenced them to create a website.
Stack Overflow and Reddit inspired us to consider introducing a diverse range of topics earlier in the onboarding process and organize search results by category.
Medium showed us that restructuring a sites homepage could be essential to understanding the importance of information that is presented to you. Twitter gave us the idea to create a simple navigation that would allow users to specify what they are looking for.
We gathered some feedback on the first iteration of the website built solely by engineers. We asked users to click around the website and search for pretty much anything - we didn’t want to lead their experience.
Whether or not the user knew of The Practical Dev, the feedback we received was quite similar. Users were unaware of several levels of content and they could not distinguish between their search results. Many participants felt the homepage was overwhelming and did not appreciate the infinite scrolling that had been initially established throughout the page. Everybody voiced their discontent with being redirected to a separate page to check notifications.
Some final design concepts below:
