… + gender equity =
Seeking to address and engage with one of the UN’s Sustainable Development goals, I worked in a team of designers to lay out the foundation for “Lunch Break,” a hypothetical app that would aim to bridge identity-based disparities in the work place via building connections between employees, providing further instructional outlets to fight industry inequalities, and empowering the voices of diverse individuals in their own corporate environments.
The design piece highlighted here is the user persona constructed during research and development, a necessary document that served as the basis of the app’s core demographic.
The logo we built for the program, reflecting the “mentor / mentee” relationships which the app helps build between employees working at the same company.
Highlighting just one of many underprivileged and unrepresented voices, this user persona embodies a number of traits and sentiments expressed through survey responses about struggles with inequities in the workplace. Without identifying one such voice that feels disrespected and displaced in their own work environment, our team would not have been able to successfully design for the right audience and too many such voices would remain unheard.
The app’s style pushes angled and overlapping graphical elements to demonstrate the power of diverse thinking, with clean lines and accessible iconography maintaining a sense of professionalism and reaffirming diversity’s place in the workplace.
As a result of necessary experimentation to determine how to best engage with our audience and communicate our message, the color palette changed drastically throughout development; as presented in the first iteration of the user persona (on the left), the Lunch Break brand was initially characterized by a bold collection of strong reds.
User testing revealed this scheme too intense for an app intended for regular use, so our team reformatted the brand to have its more palatable set of greens and purples (shades also far more closlely associated with gender equity, according to our team’s intake data).
