Problem

From 2021-2022, I was the Technical Director for Scout, Northeastern's student-led design studio, an organization with 100+ members. I worked with the Design Director, Sam Marchesi, to oversee 10 teams of students through their creation of deliverables like brand identity, packaging, marketing and e-commerce websites, identifying opportunities along the way to improve our community and process to enable Scout Studio to continue to push the standard and produce a high caliber of work.

Process

We interviewed potential clients at the beginning of each semester, understanding their design and development needs to select projects that would help students learn and produce deliverables with the potential to push the client to the next level. After selecting clients, we drew up project proposals and interviewed students whose skills fit the agreed-upon deliverables, building teams of project leads, designers, and developers structured around fostering mentorship and learning opportunities. Sam and I conducted orientations to onboard members at the beginning of each semester, adding to documentation guides for key steps in the traditional design and development process, and led workshops throughout the year to encourage community and knowledge transfer among students.

While teams worked with their clients, I supported the developers and designers, providing feedback each week on the feasibility of website designs and user stories and reviewing pull requests to enforce organization-wide code standards. I helped students prioritize features based on the tight timeline of a semester and translate user stories and sitemaps into technical feature analysis, guiding them on how to use this to select a tech stack.

Projects completed during my time as Technical Director include Sto, Ornami Skincare, and Cashflo.

Impact

While assisting students in selecting a tech stack, I realized I was providing a lot of guidance based on my personal experience with certain technical decisions throughout my previous semesters as a developer in Scout and what I had learned from going through this process with previous tech directors. I identified this as an opportunity for knowledge transfer and building out Scout's technical documentation, and created a template in Notion to gather information about previous projects' technical decisions, digging through the archive and connecting with alumni to fill out the guide for the past 5+ years of projects.

Drawing from our previous experiences as members of Scout and what we had learned from our co-op experiences, Sam and I identified that there was a lack of standardization and focus on accessibility within the organization-wide design and development process. We established an interdisciplinary team to focus on research surrounding web accessibility practices and how this could sustainably fit into our process at Scout with the goal of creating a final deliverable that improved our organization's understanding of and commitment to creating accessible products. This team produced a comprehensive Scout-specific accessibility guide that included checklists, workshop outlines, and pull request templates to encourage investment in and commitment to accessibility throughout all design and development work.