Hi I’m Aleksandra and I am a UX designer finishing my final year of Digital Design at Ulster Uni. My design style is visually engaging while still considering usability and the user’s experience. Whether it's experimenting with colour, layout or storytelling, I love bringing personality into every project.
coLAB is a digital collaboration platform designed to support creative professionals and small creative teams as they manage projects across multiple clients and collaborators. While platforms like Slack, Notion, and Microsoft Teams offer overlapping features, coLAB is built to streamline workflows specifically for creative professionals.
Through an initial discovery survey, I identified that creative professionals often stitch together several tools to manage their work, which leads to fragmentation, versioning issues and confusion about where conversations or files are. coLAB bridges that gap by offering a more intuitive, visually-led environment tailored to how creative teams actually work.
My research process began with user interviews, surveys and competitor analysis, focusing on finding out how creative professionals currently manage collaboration and what tools currently exist. I spoke to creative professionals to understand their pain points with existing tools. These insights helped validate a key need: the desire for a more creative-friendly space where collaboration, communication, planning and file handling are more efficient.
After gathering insights, I began ideating core features such as team workspaces, visual timelines, and feedback systems. To truly understand the users I am designing for, I developed user personas, empathy maps, and storyboards that reflect the day-to-day realities of creative professionals.
This helped me refine how coLAB’s interface should guide users intuitively through actions like uploading assets or sharing feedback. I created lo-fi wireframes to map content hierarchy and structure user journeys. These were followed by mid-fi prototypes to explore layout and interaction patterns, before finalising a high-fidelity prototype with a consistent design system and brand identity that feels approachable and made for a creative audience.
Designing coLAB has been an invaluable experience, allowing me to deepen my understanding of design thinking, user research and problem-solving. It challenged me to balance user-centred design with engaging visuals. I’m proud of how coLAB evolved from an initial idea into a functional platform concept that creative teams can genuinely see themselves using.
You can look at the research and development of my prohect here – coLAB
