&grow is a productivity tool for individuals who want to invest in self-enrichment but can’t find the time, or are overwhelmed to do so.
&grow adds events, articles, and more to users’ calendars automatically, based on their learning preferences and their availability.
Who among us hasn’t experienced FOMO around industry trends and discussions, and even world events?
For many, despite a strong desire to stay in the loop, the overwhelming amount of resources can result in information overload and anxiety, and ironically, the fear of being left behind can be immobilizing.
Having struggled with these feelings myself, I wasn’t fully aware of just how much they affect others until I began mentoring younger designers.
To understand the commonality of this issue, I created a Google Form survey. I decided to focus on smaller and more familiar groups of people, and shared the survey across Designers Facebook and WhatsApp groups. I got powerful insights from 44 designers about their habits with self learning and enrichment:
45%
Are unhappy with the amount of knowledge and connections they’re acquiring, 50% of which are Seniors
Say their biggest pain point with keeping up with events and news in their industry is lack of time
52%
Keep up with goals they set themselves in their calendar
“…Other than Facebook that really helps to keep up (with lots of distractions on the way),
there are so many other knowledge sources scattered around different blogs, etc…
I wish I could subscribe only to those sites and get a personalized feed from them.”
To give myself a better visual of the product, I designed the sign-up process for &grow, despite it not being part of
the MVP. I kept in mind that the design might change as the product is tested.
The sign-up flow is simple:
While analyzing the results from my user survey I thought, what if I could create a tool that collects articles from different websites based on users’ preferences, and adds them to their calendar when they’re free?
Not only would this save the time and frustration that would go into scavenging for articles between different resources, but it could ‘make’ time for the users to read them.
Not sure how to go about building such a tool, I reached out to my trusted friend, ChatGPT.
After turning to sources like ChatGPT, Stackoverflow, and Github to understand the rough amount of effort and skills required to build an MVP to test on a few users, I asked a DevOps expert and friend, Dror Nir, to help me build a plan.
Together, we put together a solid plan:
The MVP worked – new articles were successfully added to my calendar, proving the core idea.
However, the system wasn’t fully automated. While the code handled the calendar integration, article links and categories still had to be added manually to the database.
As life got in the way, I put the project on standby, and I hope to come back with more experience and a fresh perspective.
In 2021 I took the lead on redesigning the main navigation of our SaaS platform, Voltax.
Leading the project consisted of managing, presenting, co-researching,
co-ideating, and co-testing, as well as design and hand-off.
Voltax, a SaaS platform developed by Minute Media, offers content publishers a Video Library that is at the heart of its efficient video content creation and management system.
