Mindstone
Challenge
Mindstone is an online platform to organise, share and take notes on web pages, PDFs, videos and podcasts. The app is trying to help people to learn better and more efficiently.
The idea came from the two founders who realised that the way people are currently studying is broken and could be vastly improved. With that idea they decided to create an app to help students by first grouping all their study material, and later by having pathways of learning.
The app started being called Bloom but eventually got rebranded as Mindstone.
My role
I came to this start-up as a founding member. I worked on the project from day 1 and was involved in all discussions about the app’s future. I did:
- User Research
- Usability testing
- User interviewing
- Wireframing
- UI design
- Design system
- Front-end development (React)
Research
We first started aiming the product at entrepreneurs and people with high positions who need to constantly be learning. After some interviews we realised that it was not a great market and switched to university students.
At Mindstone research is an ongoing process. I was working closely with the chief learning officer. Every week we conducted interviews, sent out surveys, did usuability tests, always refining our understanding of the users and exploring.
Our main goal was to identify the pain points the users had and see if our app addressed those issues.
Ideation
Every week we had new versions of the app usually with a new feature. It meant that the week before would start with defining the feature from the data we had from the latest user research, I’d do some quick wireframes to show the team what it could be like. After that I would make a prototype, test it with user, gather their feedback, modify, etc. Once we had something good I would move on to a polished design and implement some of it.
Fasr wireframing and a lot of user testing was the way to go. Many ideas ended up no being implemented. The app was ever changing.
