Innovate WithIN™

Overview

Innovate WithIN™ is a statewide initiative to promote entrepreneurial thinking in a high school and middle school students. This is done through three different tracks: Programming, Pitching, and Pathways. Programming teaches middle school students basic concepts and critical thinking during organized learning learning sessions. Pitching involves a statewide pitch competition for high school students where they are given the chance to share their most innovative ideas. Pathways provides scholarships for high education, mentorship opportunities, internships, and more to student who participate in the program.

Role

For the redesign of the website, I acted as the lead designer. I worked closely with the user experience team to evaluate the content and restructure it to allow users to navigate through the site in a more natural way, as well as, redesign the pitch sign up and submission process to be a more simple process.

While working on the design for the user facing site, I designed an admin panel that could help manage the user who created accounted to participate in the pitch competition, view all the submit materials for the pitch competition, update dates and deadlines for the user facing site, and more. All content on the user facing site were previously hard coded in, so the new admin panel allowed those who were running the competition to make changes without needing a developer to intervene.

When it came time to develop the user facing site, I work with one other front end developer to make the designs come to life. Before that, we sat down with the back end developers on the project and all worked together to determine what elements should be made into reusable components and created a clean file structure to work from. After all the styling was completed, we a few extensive rounds of browser testing.

For the original website, I played a small role and created many illustrative icons that were used throughout the site and in addition media pieces, like newsletters and videos. Those icons continued to be featured on the new website.