Cofolios is a website that displays design interns at top tech companies. It acts as a resource for potential applicants.
UX Design
Developer
October 17, 2017
60K pageviews within the first 5 months. Featured on Product Hunt
Most companies hiring design interns tell them what they like to see in design portfolios but usually don’t provide examples. Cofolios aims to solve this problem.
Before I started designing, I needed to confirm others experieced this problem. To confirm this, I interviewed design students and asked them about their pain points.
All of the designers I interviewed said they encountered the same struggles. This allowed me to proceed in research.
The companies I selected were:
Design Focused -- Student designers are my audience
Popular -- Popular companies attract more students.
Intern Heavy -- The companies needed to have many interns. This would provide more references for students.
After choosing companies I decided to start reaching out to interns that worked there. I emailed around 40 design interns asking if I could feature their portfolio on my website.
I intended for the design simple and lightweight to put more emphasis on the companies' brand power and intern portfolios. I also used a grid layout because it would be easier to scale with.
I experimented with different layouts in my sketchbook to decided on which were the best.
Here I sketched out how the homepage would be viewed on mobile. I placed the submit button at the top to make sure it was the most dominate CTA. I also made the companies cards because if the website did gain traction, I would need an easy way to add more.
This is the step after selecting a company. I pick modals over new pages because modals help keep the users in the same context of the website without any extra clicks.
This is a sketch of the desktop version. It's very similar to the mobile sketch, but emphasizes the most popular companies. Emphasizing popular companies shows people people quality up front.
I intended for the design simple and lightweight to put more emphasis on the companies' brand power and intern portfolios. I also used a grid layout because it would be easier to scale the website.
The website was well recieved. People are even returning to the site, which indictates that there is a need for this product.
One interesting insight is that being on Cofolios increased interns page traffic by the thousands. This means that it could possibly expose them to many other opportunities.
Stor
Product Design
