Leading and building the world 3rd largest Burning Man community systems
Aug 2018 - Apr 2019, Midburn (volunteering)
TL;DR
đź’ŞÂ Creating and managing a mentoring program for junior designers to gain experience and volunteer at the same time.
💪 Setting the foundations for Midburn’s design system platforms.
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Background
Midburn event is the official regional event organised by the Midburn community – the Israeli Burning Man community. For the past decade, the Midburn community grew to 12k yearly participants that are responsible for the creation of the events, all year round.
After volunteering and participating in several events in different roles, I decided to join talented product managers and developers and form a design team to help and craft a good user experience for all of Midburn tech applications.
As the Head of UX, I led the digital user experience for all of the Midburn Tech department, along with guiding and mentoring the designers' team. As part of my volunteer work, I am responsible for creating a user based experience for all of Midburn community events throughout the year, which includes the database systems, ticketing and other CRM systems for suppliers, artists and theme camps.
Creating the design system
Showcased here is a small sampling of the detailed specs for all the UI components and features of the Midburn’s design system. All done to explore and document the UX, and used by the developers and designers to build the product. The specs aim to cover all scenarios, from rollover states to errors, active/inactive states etc…, all to create a single and unique user experience for all of our platforms.
When your friends are also your users
The fun part of being in the Midburn Tech department is that our users are probably our friends, or friends with our friends, giving us a clear connection to check and test our flows and ideas with our users.
Before we started to redesign the platforms we conducted user research with a lot of key roles within the community that already had the chance to work with the existing systems, gain insights and share our thoughts and roadmap to make sure we are heading the right direction.
Help the community and gain experience
One of the reasons I joined the Tech Department was to form a special mentoring program that onboard junior designers that had no experience in the product world, and to give them the relevant experience by building the community digital platforms along with other developers and product managers.
The first platform that allowed us to test our design system was the Spark system. Spark is the place to create and manage theme camps, allocate tickets, search, manage and join a camp or an art installation team. Spark operates as a CRM platform for admins, leaders and volunteers.
After I laid the basic structure of the design system, we divided the MVP screens between the designers and formed small teams along other PM’s and developers to give the designers the opportunity to work in a product environment and design for the real world.
Here are some screens that show the implementation of the Midburn design system:
