Context

Agorize is a platform that hosts online open innovation challenges bringing together innovators and large companies around current and strategic issues.

After registering, the participant can submit a project, alone or in a team, in his/her space in order to participate in a challenge. The administrators can then consult these projects and create voting pages, in order to select those who will participate in the next step. A challenge generally consists of 3 stages: the ideation stage, the mentoring stage and the final stage designating the winning project.

Thanks to a fundraising in 2019, the R&D team tripled in size and was reorganized into squads. One of them had the objective of getting rid of the legacy code to migrate to new and more efficient technologies. This migration allowed the product team to design a SAAS-oriented experience and open the platform to new uses such as the idea box or recruitment challenges.

The main pain point of the administrator space is the disorganization of features making it complex to use. Moreover, different personas can use this space: internal to Agorize external client. Some can manage a challenge from start to finish, others are limited to certain actions.

The first step was to rethink the userflow and the organization of features.

Ideation

To rethink navigation, we organized a card sorting exercise with several internal and external users.

Card sorting is a method to organize the features of an application. These features are represented by paper cards. The user organizes the cards according to his own logic, allowing him to find the information he is looking for more easily.

The analysis of the different results allowed us to highlight groups of features linked to the key actions of a challenge: page construction, community animation, participation monitoring, team management, etc.

Solution

The admin space is now subdivided into functional blocks corresponding to the different types of administrators. The navigation is then more adapted and limits the action area of each profile.

Variations

Moreover, Agorize is opening up to new uses such as recruitment to receive applications via an offer, or the idea box to share simple ideas... we therefore needed to create new variants of this sidebar, allowing us to have wording and features adapted to each of these needs.

In addition, each page was then redesigned and we applied a new design system to improve consistency and reinforce the language design of the platform.