ECC App

Although ECC equips students with technical skills, the lack of a dedicated platform meant that students had no centralized platform to access resources.

The experience once the internship ends is also scarce. Students often struggle to maintain connections with their peers and mentors after the internship concludes. These issues persisted across multiple cohorts, indicating opportunities for a more unified student experience.

All three team members were program alumni, so we began by reflecting on our own experiences before validating them through discussions with students and the program director.

Across different cohorts from different years, four consistent themes emerged:

These insights became the foundation for our design decisions.

We worked closely with the program leader—the primary stakeholder—throughout the project. During weekly check-ins, we presented our research findings, discussed feature ideas, and gathered feedback to ensure our design aligned with both student needs and the program's long-term goals.

These conversations helped us refine our priorities and narrow the app's scope to four core features that addressed the most common pain points identified during research:

By continuously incorporating stakeholder feedback alongside user research, we refined the app into a focused MVP that addressed the most pressing student needs. Features such as gamification and a forum page were deferred to future iterations, allowing us to deliver a clear, achievable product vision in the short amount of time we have while leaving space for future enhancements.

With the core features defined, we created a sitemap to visualize the app's structure. I designed the application's information architecture to organize content into clear, intuitive user journeys.

The navigation focused on four primary destinations:

Supporting pages included authentication, private messaging, and resource libraries to minimize navigation complexity while keeping important information easily accessible.

With the application's structure established, I shifted my focus to transforming the sitemap into a cohesive mobile experience. We wanted the app to feel like a natural extension of the ECC brand, so we maintained the visual identify of the program's website. Inspired by Apple's Swift branding, we carried over the site's vibrant orange accents, clean layouts, and minimalist aesthetic.

I began by creating low-fidelity wireframes to quickly explore screen layouts, content hierarchy, and user flows before investing in visual design. These wireframes served as a foundation for our weekly stakeholder meetings, allowing us to validate our design decisions early and iterate efficiently based on feedback, ensuring a smooth final product.

After refining the layouts, we developed a high-fidelity interactive prototype in Figma. To ensure consistency across the application, I established reusable UI components, standardized typography, and a cohesive color palette that aligned with the ECC website.

The ECC App MVP was successfully delivered with a presentation to Apple executives, the ECC program leader, and other program alumni, where we introduced the research behind our design decisions and demonstrated the interactive prototype.

To create a cohesive experience, I desgined the presentation deck using the same visual language as the ECC aesthetic, incorportating a minimalist black-and-orange color palette, clean layouts, and modern typography to reinforce the project's identity.

The presentation sparked valuable discussions about the app's future, with stakeholders providing feedback that helped shape a roadmap for future iterations beyond our initial MVP.