Introduction

What’s Apprendo? 🤔

Apprendo, which means “to learn” in Spanish, is a trustworthy learning app for creatives, targeted to support current UX design apprentices within BRIDGEGOOD.

Team:

Our team name is GATE, inspired by the first initials of our members’ names! 🥸

Gianelli Liguidliguid: UX Researcher + Content Writer

Abraham Jimenez: UI Designer + Visual Content Strategist

Tia Mei: Project Manager

Esther Meza: Visual Designer + Brand Strategist

Problem:

Many creatives, particularly those with limited resources, face financial constraints and a lack of tailored education. Not having these opportunities makes it difficult for creatives to feel confident, find a community, and get inspired. Without the proper support, they struggle to enter careers in the tech and design fields.

Solution:

In 4 weeks, we designed a a free learning app from scratch, particularly for our team’s nonprofit organization BRIDGEGOOD. Apprendo lets the current cohort share their knowledge. Our app aims to make creatives feel seen, supported, and confident as they pursue their passions and careers.

Context/The Objective

This past summer, I had the opportunity to participate in a UX Design apprenticeship with BRIDGEGOOD, a nonprofit organization based in Oakland dedicated to designing for social good. We partnered with Google’s Tech Equity Collective for our capstone project during this apprenticeship. They gave us this prompt:

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How can we support underrepresented creatives to enter careers in tech or design?

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To address this challenge effectively, Team GATE began with thorough UX research to understand specific barriers that creatives face when entering the tech industry.

UX Research

We began by conducting 13 interviews for better insight into how we can support underrepresented creatives in the tech and design industry.

Questions we asked our interviewees

Common challenges:

• Lack of support and resources
  • Self-teaching was common, many turned to online videos
• Difficulty breaking into the industry
  • Career switchers, imposter syndrome

Key insights:

• Financial constraints
  • Design software is expensive. (Ex. Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator)
• Accessibility
  • Reduced access to higher quality programs, has to resort to lower quality substitute programs

To sum up/organize our findings, we created user personas.

We then surveyed over 60 different participants and asked them one last question:

Which resource is the most important to you when entering the tech and design industry?

To which, 63% answered: