Demola is a global platform that connects students with organizations to tackle real-world challenges. The platform fosters innovation and hands-on learning through co-creation, concept development, and prototyping. Previously, the entire process was decentralized, making it difficult to track progress, manage teams, and ensure consistency in execution. The challenge was to design a unified platform that would serve as a central workspace for project participants while also facilitating communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.

Demola collaborates with corporate clients and government institutions to develop solutions for various challenges. Clients define problems and provide data and materials necessary for informed decision-making. The platform brings together top students from different universities to work as a team on these challenges. These teams are provided with structured workflows, tools, and mentoring to help them navigate the innovation process step by step. However, the lack of a unified digital environment made collaboration fragmented and inefficient.

Our task was to create a well-structured and user-friendly platform that would allow participants to work efficiently across all project stages, from problem analysis to final solution presentation.

We designed a unified workspace that included:

• A structured dashboard for tracking project progress.
• A seamless communication system with personal and group chats, as well as voice rooms.
• Integration with calendars and video conferencing tools.
• Multi-project navigation for students involved in multiple initiatives.
• A Community section where students could exchange insights, request advice, and form teams.
• A flexible design system to ensure consistency across different interface elements and support future scalability.

To develop an intuitive and efficient user experience, we conducted:

• Stakeholder interviews to understand project needs.
• Competitive analysis, evaluating direct, indirect, and adjacent competitors.
• Card sorting to determine the most effective navigation structures.
• Moderated and unmoderated user tests to validate our design solutions.

These efforts helped us gain a deep understanding of user pain points and needs, allowing us to create an experience that streamlined workflows and enhanced usability.

Our work followed an iterative process, ensuring continuous feedback and improvements. We conducted weekly kick-off meetings with developers, project owners, and mentors. Each iteration was reviewed, with adjustments made based on real-world feedback.

We conducted research to understand how users interact with different project phases and designed solutions that catered to both students and mentors. We focused on usability, ensuring that tools and resources were easily accessible and intuitive. A major part of our work was designing the tools used in various project phases, ensuring that they facilitated smooth execution and collaboration.

The client received finalized designs in Figma, accompanied by detailed developer documentation. This included:

• Full platform functionality breakdown.
• Research findings and key insights.
• Design system components ensuring consistency across all interface elements.