Open Source Skateboards
Product Design & Research
2022-2023
SK8CAD is the world's first open source CAD program for custom skateboard builders. Their motive is to promote learning, engineering, and design thinking skills by providing a tool that is easy for all levels of makers to use in their board making process.
Team:
Jacqueline Baker- Product Designer & Researcher
Claire Schiekl- UX Researcher
Beau Trifiro- Founder, Open Source Skateboards
Deliverables:
Evaluative Research Report, Style Guide, and hi-fi mock ups in Figma.
Hi-Fi Mock up ©Jacqueline Baker 2024
Open Source Skateboards is a board building manufacturer where customers can use its open-source program, SK8CAD, to design and order their boards through its shop. At the project's inception, they had over 200 users worldwide. As of July 2024, this number has grown to over 1000 users globally.
Image courtesy of © Open Source Skateboards 2024
Objective:
The stakeholder’s goal was to increase membership subscriptions on SK8CAD. We were tasked with auditing the current SK8CAD platform and conceptualizing a new feature that caters to beginner-level makers.
Identifying Open Source Skateboards User Base:
Hobbyists (Patreon Supporters)
Customers who make their own boards as a hobby.
Educators using OSS 3D printed molds & open source CAD program in heir after-school programming.
Educators
Small Business Owners
Shapers who sell their own designs & hand shaped boards, using OSS manufacturing process’.
Research Report:
20+ SK8CAD Users interviewed, recruited by the CEO.
15 Usability Tests conducted with original SK8CAD program
Hot Jar Map Tracking of SK8CAD & Open Source’s Website
Google Analytics Tracking for 3+ Months
Findings:
Finding information on parameters and tutorials:
75% failed
Tutorials were not easily available, but a PDF user guide is.
Users wanted a search option for any help related tools along with the user guide.
31.76% of our tasks were performed successfully-
This would help tackle the main goal of converting new subscribers to SK8CAD
Tutorials and help needed to be at the forefront of SK8CAD
The UI needed to be simplified for SK8CAD’s parameters
Concept:
Sketch © Jacqueline Baker 2023
Our team’s initial idea was to take the existing 'user guide,' which was in PDF format, and optimize it as a feature within SK8CAD that users could readily refer to when designing in the program.
Sketch © Jacqueline Baker 2023
After iterating on the user guide, we came up with the ‘Shape Library’, a feature shipped in partnership with Gemstack IT developers.
You can see more of Gemstack’s work here:
Final Design:
Users can access the Shape Library with any subscription. Paid members have access to their own ‘libraries’ and can save their own shapes to edit and manipulate to their desired outcome.
This allows:
Access to pre-made designs to learn basic 3D modeling
20+ designs for them to collect and use
Style Guide:
Hi-FI Mocks done by © Jacqueline Baker 2023
Responsive mobile design:
