Buddy

CHALLENGE

Junior designers face a catch-22: you need commercial experience to get hired, but you need to get hired to gain that experience. Courses teach theory, and juniors miss the real feedback, don't grasp the constraints, and underestimate the responsibility of an actual project, so coursework rarely earns an employer's trust.

APPROACH

Before designing anything, I interviewed juniors, mid-to-senior designers, and HR specialists. I expected seniors to become mentors, but they don't have the time or motivation to delegate real work to juniors, often because of NDAs. The real audience turned out to be mid-level designers: mentoring gives them practice on the way to a lead role, and paid sessions on the platform bring in income. That finding changed the whole product logic for me, from 'seniors delegate tasks' to 'mids mentor and grow'. From there: user flows, wireframes, a basic design system, a high-fidelity clickable prototype, and a promo landing page. I built it all around one core loop: a junior takes a task, gets mentor feedback, and I mark the work verified.

OUTCOME

A researched, validated MVP concept: user personas, flows, a high-fidelity prototype, and a live promo landing page. A project I want to build and launch.

RESULTS

• Interviewed and surveyed 25 people across 3 user groups
• Found that mid-level designers, not seniors, are the right mentor audience
• Pivoted the MVP from task-matching to a verified feedback loop
• Delivered personas, user flows, a high-fidelity prototype, and a promo landing page

PROTOTYPE WALKTHROUGH