IDEALIZE

Connecting Ideas Across Campuses

At-A-Glance

Idealize is an open-source platform for Hochschule Heilbronn where students, lecturers and researchers can post their projects and send collaboration requests. It works like a project-focused social network: users can present ideas, search and join projects, comment, share updates, and build teams across faculties and campuses. Idealize was built as part of INDUKO, its parent project at Hochschule Heilbronn.

MY ROLE
End-to-end UX/UI design
TEAM
Team lead, a professor, frontend developer, backend developer and students
TIMELINE
4 months

The Problem

At Hochschule Heilbronn, great semester projects kept vanishing at semester’s end and I was brought in to design an app to fix it; below are the causes stakeholders pointed to:

Map of the four campuses

GEOGRAPHICAL DISTANCE

Four campuses (Bildungscampus, Sontheim, Schwäbisch Hall, Künzelsau) made collaboration across locations difficult.

Faculties working in silos

LACK OF INTER-FACULTY COLLABORATION

Faculties such as Business, Engineering, and Computer Science worked in silos with little exchange of ideas or shared visibility.

Projects ending with the semester

PROJECTS END WITH THE SEMESTER

Many innovative ideas and projects were dropped when the semester ended.

EMPATHISE

  • I first quantified the hunches with a 10-professor survey:
Survey results from ten professors

From the survey’s open question (“What do you want this platform to do for you?”), answers converged on four essentials: one durable home for projects (with an archive), fast discovery of people and work (search, tags, AI matching), effortless cross-faculty/industry collaboration and a lightweight social layer for commenting and sharing.

  • Then I ran an ice-breaker workshop to get honest input and uncover real workflow gaps from students and professors.
Ice-breaker workshop with students and professors

Key exercises included:

  • “I have ever…” → surfaced memories of good interdisciplinary experiences.
  • Breakout challenge → participants combined study courses to imagine synergy.
  • Silent work + voting → collected requirements and frustrations visually.

IDEATE

  • With user research results in hand, I led fast ideation sprints within the team to explore best-practice solutions to the problems discovered from the workshop and survey:
Ideation sprint results
  • After ideation produced too many good ideas, I defined an Is/Isn’t Map to focus the MVP and prevent an “Everything App”.
Is / Isn’t mapIs / Isn’t map, detail
  • I mapped how users switch hats, so tags, search and smart recommendations could handle it without new roles or UI.
How users switch between roles
  • I mapped everyday moments into personas so that the team and I could replace assumptions with empathy and specific contexts.
Persona 1
Persona 2
Persona 3
Persona 4
  • User research and ideation gave us a crowded wish list, so I sorted it into Must/Should/Could/Won’t to prioritise features and keep the team (and me) focused.
Must / Should / Could / Won’t prioritisation
  • To help people find relevant projects, my team and I defined a lightweight tag-based recommender (exact + adjacent matches) that shows each user personalised content.
Tag-based recommender diagram
  • Finally, to stop everyone pointing to different maps, I built one “what lives where” information architecture.
Information architecture

PROTOTYPE AND TESTING

  • Low Fidelity Usability Test: I pressure-tested the navigation in lo-fi, so hi-fi wasn’t guesswork:
Low-fidelity test, slide 1
Low-fidelity test, slide 2
Low-fidelity test, slide 3
Low-fidelity test, slide 4
Low-fidelity test, slide 5
Low-fidelity test, slide 6
Low-fidelity test, slide 7
Low-fidelity test, slide 8
Low-fidelity test, slide 9
Low-fidelity test, slide 10
  • Now I was ready to start designing the experience:

Onboarding

Students enter their name, study programme, and interests to get curated suggestions from day one.

Homepage with trending, latest and favourite projects

Homepage

Cards show trending, latest, and favourite projects.

The layout is intentionally “light academia”: clean whites, subtle navy, and soft yellow accents.

Project Profile

Acts like a micro-community space:

Users can comment, react, and join projects without awkward email threads.

Add Project

Step-based creation with validation at each step: title → description → tags → members → cover image.

Profile screen with projects, interests and fields of study

Profile

A crisp snapshot of each user’s academic identity: projects, interests and fields of study.

Chatbot screen

Chatbot

To help users find relevant content faster, I added a conversational assistant. The chatbot fetches projects and people, not just keywords.

  • High-fidelity usability test: all 8 participants finished every task. We only had to tweak some icons and labels before handing the design over for development ✅

IMPACT AND REFLECTION

Impact:

  • Behaviour in the first 6 weeks after launch was positive: people didn’t just join; they started projects, tagged them for discovery, and engaged through join-requests, favourites, and discussion.
Platform dashboard after launch
  • Campus tests: pop-ups, classroom sessions and faculty summits showed strong reception (4.4/5 satisfaction, 82% intent, NPS +36)
Campus test 1
Campus test 2
Campus test 3

What I took with me:

My Krebsberatungs-App project taught me that the quality of design depends on honest, first-hand input, so I brought that lesson into Idealize and put extra focus on running research with users so I hear honest input first, then design. In early mixed workshops at the university, students held back around professors and professors softened their own struggles. I shifted the format to level the room with simple ice-breakers and anonymous inputs so everyone was just a person trying to start a project. Once titles disappeared, the real obstacles surfaced. The takeaway is simple: Research comes first.

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