A developer, two designers, and a little patience are all you need to change the world. Working in the advertising world allowed us to see the power of media and how it sets standards of beauty, drives the direction of markets, and steers collective conversation.

Our primary mission is to empower creatives by giving them the resources to share their communities' culture and make it searchable.

At the start of the project, we had three main questions in mind.

How might we…

1. Create a stock library of content large enough to supply the needs of customers?
2. Provide a marketplace for creators of color to capitalize on their libraries of stored creative content?
3. Adapt the real marketplace experience into a mobile experience?

Next, we conducted an audit of competitive apps. To identify competitive apps, we looked at three essential points:

1. Marketplace
2. User upload capability
3. Diversity of image collections
4. Cool or wow factor

To jumpstart the project, we decided to invite our community of creatives to a design thinking workshop in Brooklyn. Free pizza is known to bring out the best and brightest. Our Design Thinking workshop's goal was to spark innovation, foster a user-centric mindset, and get cross-functional teams working together towards a common goal. We separated the participants into groups based on their skills and disciplines.

We covered three of the five phases of Design Thinking: Build empathy for the user, define the user personas, ideate outcomes using hills.

We interviewed artists, producers, and business owners of color to hear their perspectives on the creative industry, the importance of culture, representation, creative needs, and technology. Here are some of the reactions that we received.

"I don't want to be judged. And I don't think my culture is accurately depicted within the mainstream. So, I believe it's an obligation to produce work that depicts our community in the best light."

"Time is money. But, accomplishing my personal and professional goals is more valuable. So, I need a system that is flexible, scalable, and durable for sourcing assets and getting work produced."

"Man, being an entrepreneur is challenging. But sometimes, it's really rewarding. One of my biggest challenges is customers understanding our message."

After separating the participants into groups base on occupation or skillset, each group received a persona with their page divided into four quadrants: says, thinks, does, and feels. They filled in each quadrant with hypothetical (or direct) quotes and observations.

Based on the patterns identified in the empathy maps, we honed in on the four user personas' habits, problems, pain points, and other details about him/her.

We gave each participant in the group stickers red (disagree), yellow (neutral), and green (agree). The task was to read the Summary, Motivators, Character Traits, Key Drivers, Values, and Channels for the group's user persona. They voted on each category for the user personas. If the group overwhelmingly disagreed, they could make edits.

Before we wrapped for the day, the groups had to use the knowledge of the user personas to write hills. By writing down the Who, What, and Wow. We persuaded the participants to think of big ideas that would become critical features of the Pepper Archive app.

Based on the patterns identified in the empathy map and hills, we decided to focus on three personas — a creator (Josh), a producer (Kelly), and a business owner (Bobby). These personas embody how typical users would navigate our app. We highlighted stages, touchpoints, thoughts, feelings, and pain-points of our personas in our user journey maps to spark ideas and functionality specs for the app.

After the amazing Design Thinking workshop, I workshopped with the team to create a project roadmap. We prioritized what feautures were most important for the launch of the MVP, and what features could be rolled out in later releases.

Pepper Archive is unique because it combines the marketplace of a stock website with a social media platform's interactivity. Users need to have the ability to view and purchase content seamlessly while also uploading and selling their content. We outlined this process with our site map, and user flows to identify issues and come up with quick and painless solutions.