UpLink

– World Economic Forum

Timeline: 3 years

UpLink is the open innovation platform of the World Economic Forum that allows to surface early-stage entrepreneurs with the goal of accelerating progress on the Sustainable Development Goals and enable an innovation ecosystem to drive positive systemic change for people and planet, by connecting them to investors, experts and partner organizations.

uplink.weforum.org

My role and responsibilities

Upon joining the project as the UX/UI design lead, I was involved in various work streams related to the existing platform. My primary responsibility was to oversee the design team and work with the product owner and business analysts to ensure ongoing alignment with platform design requirements. Additionally, I participated in discussions related to business strategy, with the goal of generating new ideas and value propositions.

UX UI Design Lead
Design team manager
Design system maintainance
Development support
Business strategy

Platform design improvements

Our continuous platform design enhancements aim to streamline the user journey, from challenge discovery and solution submission to winner announcement, ensuring every aspect is as effortless and smooth as possible.

We utilise end-user testing and feedback to understand existing issues and improve user journeys and designs to solve user pain-points and create user gains.

UpLink challenge page for the Prospering in Longevity Challenge — Challenge page – UpLink's main functionality is to allow entrepreneurs to upload their innovative solution to a specific problem that is displayed as a “challenge” in the platform. Innovator can know more about what the challenge is about and understand if the solution is the right one that could help that specific challenge.

UpLink submission flow screen — Submission flow – By clicking on “Submit” in the challenge page, innovator enters the submission flow, where the innovator can provide all the information that are necessary to allow the ideas to be reviewed by experts.

Design system maintenance

Maintaining an up-to-date design system and master screens on Figma is essential to uphold UX/UI quality and prevent wasted time during the development phase.

Upon joining the project, I noted significant inconsistencies between the existing design system and Figma screens, and the actual developed product. Consequently, I invested substantial effort in securing design time to update the design system, produce new screens that accurately reflected the product, and propose tickets and user stories with improvement and enhancement requests aimed at elevating the design quality of the platform.

Toast messages and documentation pages of the UpLink design system

Business strategy

One of the biggest challenges I noticed at the beginning of this collaboration was a lack of internal shared understanding of the value proposition. This can adversely affect not only the platform's quality but also the communication strategy and the services provided to the target personas.

To address this issue, I coordinated a series of workshops and meetings aimed at aligning on the core value proposition and gaining insight into how to reduce general inconsistencies from both a platform and communication standpoint, while supporting the responsible people in enhancing the services offered to the target personas.