Overview

In 2023, I participated in a 24-hour long hackathon partnered with MongoDB to identify flaws in their educational resources and find a way to incorporate AI into the solution.

I won first place alongside two other designers, two software engineers, and a data scientist. In this process, we:

• Conducted user research. Our team conducted user research through interviews and user testing, which guided us to our final solution.
• Two deliverables. Whereas the other teams only had a single deliverable, we managed to create both a web prototype and a working chatbot.

Process

While my teammates were exploring how new users might navigate the app, my role was to learn about how developers that have used MongoDB navigated the learning process.

I interviewed 3 developers with the goal of learning (1) their learning experience using it, (2) if they faced challenges they faced in that process, and (3) if they did, how did they overcame those obstacles.

The main issues developers had with MongoDB's documentation were:

• Finding the information they were looking for was too difficult.
• Content was too vague or too dense.
• As a result, users would rely on 3rd party resources such as Youtube, ChatGPT, or Stack Overflow.
  

Our Solution

We chose to address these user issues through a two-part solution: redesigning the onboarding to help users find what they need easier and faster and introducing ChatGPT to MongoDB's chatbot to catch users in the cases they cannot.

I was responsible for concepting, designing, and handing off the design to the developers (who then built it). My goal with the new design was to make it feel friendly and have preset options to help nudge users to find the information they're looking for.
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If I had more time, I would have liked to do more research to understand what types of things users got stuck on to hone in on what preset message options would be the most helpful.

Chatbot (MongoDBot)

The new onboarding was designed and prototyped in Figma by the two other developers which allowed us to take advantage of our developer-designer ratio. Their goal was to declutter and remove unnecessary information while making important information easily visible.

Onboarding Redesign

How much is too much?

While our larger scope was one of the primary reasons for us winning the industry project, we finished our deliverables cutting it very close to wire (some parts only an hour before presentation!). However, it taught me the value of understanding the needs and capabilities of my teammates.
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In fact, that experience got me my next position as a UX/UI Intern at Qnary.