Before we begin...

Projects happen to be the primary submission method of UNI competitions. The project aims to not only be just a submission portal but a holistic portfolio project builder for architecture related projects that can expand to students as well as professional level showcases.

You can learn more about UNI competitions here.

Background

One of the fundamental ways to manage design content was conceived as 'projects' on UNI - the same way figma has files. UNI's first GTM was to be a portfolio website for discussions, where projects as a feature has been a core of that piece.

However, that model completely crashed and only competitions survived. In our later endeavors what we eventually realized is the fact - 'projects' still has to be the driving factor as the competitions are temporal and projects are the permanent hooks for our audience to explore.

How the project came to existence

The old UNI (2018-18) was made as an MVP not designed for scaling and eventually got riddled with bugs. After the main competition experience was complete the old project pages need to be shelved because of unavoidable issues mushrooming.

Our customer support was usually swamped with submission queries until midnight especially when a significant number of submissions came from different time zones - many a times these went on till 5am (a time when employees aren't available, so it was mostly us replying as customer support).

This recurring event and several breakdowns, plus potential feature needs - led to an overhaul of the project feature of UNI.

Project outline

Create a stand-alone project uploader that can handle images, videos, text and location - fitting for everything an architecture project published online will ever need. The steps to upload can be many but differentiating crucial path of user should always be covered. Additionally, there should be incentive to fill their maximum information as possible as to boost retention in future with more content leading to more user retention.

3 major user segments

1st type the competition submission audience who use the uploader only as a means to get their submission near the deadline. These are the primary user group for the current use case, but they will not continue to be in the future.

2nd use case is designers who liked either the competition submission experience or liked other projects and got motivated to publish their own works. This use case is rare in current situation but one of the places UNI would like to be in future.

3rd use case is the fact that designers are generally not just publishing content always - they are also discovering and exploring projects for inspiration. This is the use case we're aiming to achieve as a result.

The design process is centered around the 1st and 3rd audience segment, where we keep segment 2 behind our mind to achieve all great design results for all 3 of these.

Brainstorming and research

Architecture sheets are essentially long form stories with layers of information and drawings, which are usually very dense with information and requires a lot of zooming - especially because they are designed for print first and not web. At the same time, we had to made it mobile ready as well to boost discovery on the move.

We saw various competing platforms like Behance, Dribbble, Coroflot to understand how projects are stored across the web for creatives. The audiences of these are fairly diverse but mostly centered around graphic designers. The idea was to ensure that there is some degree of familiarity at the same time having specific features that architects would want. Behance is clearly the market leader when it comes to such portfolio experiences - and we questioned both types of uploaders the platform used to offer back then - the infinite scroll and the image gallery.

We realized sequential nature is an essential and hence scroll mode is what we went ahead with.

Design Principle

With our experience of previous UNI project uploader of not living up to the expectations of scale - it was easy to determine the new projects have to made as modular as possible and easy to adapt for future use cases - even the ones which are extremely. The components created here will always be restructured but the base components conceived should never change and the first iteration taught us that.

Final outcomes

Here's how the new uploader looked like.

Sending invites to contributors

A big part of UNI percolating to other architects is inviting contributors and giving them edit access. These are the kind of email notifications they usually receive when they invite their team At least 4 people are suggested per competition team, and they're a great way for students/professionals to bring the entry fee down.

People's choice sharing

The biggest hook was a cash award embedded for getting more likes on their projects in the form of people's choice.

Impact

By prioritizing more content and more detail, we are making users go the hard path - but at the same time realizing competition users are momentary in a lot of cases, it made sense to channelize that in building better ranking and valuable content for users to explore.

These are the stats achieved by consistently building project as feature over the years - where a lot of links and reach are by our users sharing these as knowledge resources or by universities who's students were featured in here.