Te Rawenga
My capstone project was a 12-week solo UX/UI design challenge to research, design, and test a digital diversity calendar. I conducted exploratory and evaluative research, identified key user pain points, and iteratively wireframed and tested my solution.
Overview
Role: Lead Designer
Timeline: 12 weeks
Year: 2022
Tools: Figma, Miro, Adobe
Problem
As New Zealand’s workforce grows more diverse, it’s vital for businesses to foster inclusive environments where everyone feels valued and respected.
Many business owners lack the confidence, resources, or cultural understanding to celebrate diversity in meaningful ways, leaving good intentions unsupported by practical tools or guidance.
Solution
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Equip business owners with culturally informed resources.
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Provide connections to local cultural experts and communities.
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Encourage inclusive celebration planning that aligns with employee identities.
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Build employer confidence in supporting workplace diversity respectfully
Design process
Double diamond
My design project follows an adapted version of the “Revamped Double Diamond’’ (Nessler, 2018), a flexible process that allows the user to apply whatever suits them and use it in a way that works best. Each phase utilised methods from ‘The Field Guide to Human-centred Design (IDEO, 2015).
Discover
Assumptions
Before I began, I listed my assumptions about what my research may uncover.
Secondary Research
I first started off with secondary research to help validate the problem, gather some evidential statistics and guide my primary research. This included reviewing case studies, articles, Statistical Documents, blog posts etc. Here were some of my key findings.
Fun and Celebrations at Work Improve Outcomes
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Fun activities such as food, contests, outings, and awards/prizes are highly preferred by employees (Becker, 2012).
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Celebrations recognizing personal milestones, social events, and public achievements are especially valued.
Cultural Inclusion is Lacking in NZ Workplaces
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Many feel excluded or misunderstood due to a lack of cultural awareness and celebration (Inclusive Aotearoa Collective Tāhono, 2021).
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Authentic cultural activities, led by cultural representatives, are essential to increase belonging
Fun Enhances Workplace Relationships and Culture
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Celebrations foster connections and help build a stronger community at work (Grastorf, 2018).
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They lead to greater enthusiasm, creativity, communication, and group cohesiveness (Ford, Newstrom & McLaughlin, 2004).
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Fun environments contribute to stronger corporate cultures and better leader-employee relationships.
competitor analysis
Following my secondary research, I started to research competitors so I could evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. The insights gained here provided key information in terms of the strengths I want to build upon and the weaknesses we want to avoid while keeping my specific goals for the final solution in mind.
I then placed them on a comparative scale regarding their interactiveness / educational aspect and specificness. I found that there was a gap missing in the market for a solution that was both interactive / educational but also specific to New Zealand.
primary research
Due to this project’s ethics, primary data was restricted to being collected from students.
I conducted user interviews with people who had experience working in a business before. During these interviews, I asked open-ended questions to learn as much as I could about their current experiences and identify what the user’s needs truly are. I conducted interviews with 5 people, about 15-20 minutes each.
I also sent out a google forms survey to my class cohort to collect as much data as I could to help further understand my users current workplace experiences. I received 10 responses.
Interviews Questions
1. How big is this business you have worked for?
2. Can you recall a time when your workplace celebrated a diversity event or week?
3. If so, what did they do to celebrate this event?
4. Does your workplace celebrate any other diversity events? Why or why not?
5. Does your workplace make an effort to celebrate your culture? Why or why not?
6. Do you feel valued and important in your workplace? Why or why not?
7. What are your thoughts on a Digital diversity calendar to help make it easier for businesses to celebrate diversity within the workplace?
Survey Questions
1. Do you currently work in a business or have you previously worked for one in the past? This could include internships, office-style jobs, part-time work etc.
2. How big is this business?
3. Does this business celebrate or acknowledge any of the following events?
4. Can you give an example of how this business acknowledged or celebrated one of these events?
5. Do you think celebrating Diversity in the workplace is important?
6. Why do you think this?
Empathy map
Using an empathy map, I synthesized all the information I gathered during the user interviews to uncover key insights that led to understanding the target users needs.
This helped me to uncover common patterns that led to key insights which would help me identify what our users’ needs truly are.
Personas
Through my primary and secondary research, I was able to get a clear picture of who my target users are and created some personas that would accurately represent them. These personas continued to guide my decisions moving forward, making sure my design is centered on who our user is.
iNSIGHTS
Here are some of the key insights I developed from my secondary and primary research.
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Smaller Business owners find it challenging to celebrate culture because they are uneducated about their employees' culture.
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Larger Businesses are more focused on celebrating and embracing Aotearoa's Culture than other cultures.
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Most existing Diversity Calendars, either made for profit, don't include Aotearoa's holidays and are generally focused on more than just cultural celebrations.
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Smaller Business owners struggle to celebrate and socialise with their employees in a way that is inclusive and welcoming of everyone.
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Larger Businesses are often divided into departments, making organising and celebrating cultural events more complex.
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Most businesses have calendar services that they already use to help schedule their employees.
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Some offices operate remotely which can make it difficult to ensure employees are feeling valued and included.
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There is not a lot of encouragement or drive for business to embrace and celebrate their employees culture. They don't understand what the positive effects it could have on their employees work ethic.
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Christmas, Easter and birthdays are many companies main celebrations that they put effort into.
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Smaller workplace employees often feel more connected and welcomed since everyone knows everyone. They are less likely to be left out/ not included.
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Larger Business often already have plans and procedures in place to ensure they are celebrating their employees diversity
Define
tHE PROBLEM
Using my secondary and primary research, as well as my curated insights, I went on to further define the problem I was going to be solving.
Business owners of small and medium-sized workplaces find it difficult to embrace their employees' ethnicity and religion. This is due to a lack of education, resources, and overall guidance regarding individual employees' different cultures and traditions in the workplace. They often do not have the same access to services and people that larger businesses may have to help them celebrate diversity.
how might we
After defining my problem, I could go on to create a how might we statement to further direct and guide my project.
How might we help business owners make their employees feel included and valued through cultural celebrations?
Develop
Brainstorming
Now that I knew what problems I needed to solve, I started my brainstorming process to come up with solutions to those problems. I used the HMW question that I identified and designed a vision to help me brainstorm different ideas through mind mapping.
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Bundling Ideas
From brainstorming, I ended up with a lot of different ideas. I bundled some of these ideas to come up with some unique solutions that addressed many of my users' needs.
Chosen Idea: A personalised digital diversity calendar service designed for small to medium businesses. It gathers employee input on cultural celebrations—such as traditions, food, music, and language—and turns it into a shared workplace calendar.
DESIGN VISION
I created a design vision for what I envisioned my end solution to be.
Cultural celebrations are important in the workplace because they make employees feel confident and valued. Taking the time to celebrate and learn about someone's culture sends the message that they're welcome. Their ideas matter, and they are valued.
The effect of this is that people feel more comfortable, think more creatively, and bring more of their ideas confidently to the table. When there's respect, relationship and inclusion, you get the best out of your people and build your organisation's company culture at the same time.
There is an opportunity for a diversity calendar service that guides small/medium businesses on how to celebrate their employees' culture. This will give business owners a starting point to celebrate diversity and help avoid poor/ offensive attempts at celebrating culture.
I want to make it easier for businesses to celebrate diversity who don't already have a process in place, unlike larger businesses such as Spark or HSBC, and help them connect to existing services and communities to help them celebrate this diversity.
Site map
Focusing on the prioritised idea, I created a site map to help define the overall structure of the content and services within Te Rawenga in a way that would be logical and easy to navigate for our user.
User Journey
I decided to define the journey that a user would go through when using my service. This helped communicate my idea to stakeholders and gave them a better understanding of how my service worked. This took 4 iterations until I landed on this as my final user journey.
Low fidelity wireframes
Taking what I’ve learned throughout my process to this point, I started to make decisions on how Te Rawenga would start to look by creating some very quick sketches and low fidelity wireframes.
Mid fidelity wireframe
In order to make sure the design decisions I made in the lo-fi wireframes effectively help reach my project goals, I wanted to get to a point where we could test the design with real users.
I did this by taking the lo-fi wireframe sketches and digitalizing them on Figma. These mid-fidelity wireframes would help my focus on what needed to be improved in terms of the functionality of my design.
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Testing & iterations
With my prototype completed, I recruited 5 participants and conducted testing in order to see how users felt about each part of the service and identify where improvements to the design can be made. I also asked them to try and navigate their way around the website. I took note of what the participants liked and disliked about each feature.
From the results of this testing, I decided to make the following changes:
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Reworded some of the questions to come across as less demanding
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Replaced some of the typing questions with multi-choice.
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Added a clarification of the difference between nationality and ethnicity for the user
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Changed the display of the survey, so it comes across as more important
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Changed the way responses are displayed
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Added an option for business owners to alter the survey/ add their own questions
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The map is more interactive
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Changed employee profile information layout
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Changed colour the of the map tags to match the colour palette
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The map is more interactive
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Changed employee profile information layout
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Changed colour the of the map tags to match the colour palette
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Added more colour to the dashboard
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Added different greetings for each day
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Added exporting option for calendar events 20
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Changed colours of essential events
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Changed display of employee survey responses so that they are more effective
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Created a more user-friendly interface that allows for collaboration
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Added an export option at the end of the event creation for easier exportation
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Improved the layout of the survey
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Added a section to display feedback on the event pages
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Added an email option to the survey
Branding
I next put together a brand identity for Te Rawenga. My focus was make it feel inviting, soft and friendly, as those are some of the values it stands for.
High Fidelity wireframes
Incorporating visual elements in line with Te Rawengas branding, I worked on the UI design of the website and created high fidelity wireframes.
Our cultural celebration service helps business owners create an inclusive and welcoming workplace by reducing their lack of knowledge around their employees diversity and helping them to celebrate all cultures and identities within the workplace.
VIDEO
Part of my capstone submission was to create a short video that explains the why and how of Te Rawenga.
My Learnings
Reflection & NEXT STEPS
Over the course of this project, I navigated a dynamic and often challenging design process, from early discovery and defining my proposal, to developing and refining a culturally empowering service for workplaces.
I learned the importance of flexibility, especially when navigating research ethics and adapting to feedback that challenged my assumptions. Engaging with real-world stakeholders and receiving input from lecturers helped sharpen my focus, pushing me to consider both the employee and employer perspectives.
Time management proved to be one of my biggest challenges, particularly in the final weeks as tasks like video production and poster refinement took longer than anticipated. Despite setbacks, I grew in my ability to communicate complex ideas visually and iteratively.
Moving forward, I plan to build on this momentum by continuing to explore inclusive design practices, improving my time management, and further developing my prototyping and storytelling skills to make my work even more impactful.
