Problem

ILUVUS was thought up in 2023 by Georgia Tech MBA alumnus and entrepreneur, Jay Elliot, in response to recent efforts to erase inclusivity programs and marginalized histories. The goal: create a safe, celebratory online space for marginalized communities - something that remains missing from exisiting social media platforms.
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My Contributions & Process

I gathered a team of designers and developers to take on the project from a previous team in Sept. 2024. As the project lead, I performed a cross-functional role in product management, design, and development. Throughout the project, I also headed up client communications making sure to collect, prioritize, and communicate our client's requirements to ensure smooth execution and delivery.
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• Led vision refinement, user research/testing, product requirements mapping, as well as design and prototyping in Figma.
• Maintained our roadmap in JIRA, conducted sprint planning, and contributed to backend coding.
• Managed scope & task delegation across both design and development phases.

Challenges

We had to balance ambitious feature goals with time and architectural constraints. Some issues we faced include:

• During setup, we had to familiarize ourselves with an already built-out codebase and architecture while also triaging an outstanding bug. To handle this, we allocated extra time to deep-dive into the codebase and collaborated with a previous team member to resolve any outstanding issues with setup and configuration.
  
• We encountered loading time issues mid-development, threatening to slow down testing and feature releases - we used tools like Postman to pinpoint bottlenecks and refactored our code so we could move our loading time from minutes back down to seconds.

Results

Design: We were not only able to directly survey 50+ users, but we were also able to conduct five testing sessions to improve on our design and hit our goal of an 85% usability score and 93% task completion rate.

Development: In one year, we delivered a revamped version of ILUVUS with 15+ new features: personalized profiles, posting, fact-checking, engagement algorithms, messaging, reporting/blocking, and more. Our client not only approved our UI for continued development, but we also successfully demoed and expanded the outreach of the app at Georgia Tech's Junior Design Expo to students, faculty, and companies.