Projects
UX Design
Topcoder
Overview
I worked as a UX Designer on a new feature enhancement aimed at increasing community engagement and expanding the platform’s challenge pipeline. I designed the “Ideas” feature, a community-driven space where users could submit, discover, and upvote ideas. Highly engaged ideas would surface and evolve into official challenges, creating a direct path from community input to monetized opportunities. This initiative focused on bridging the gap between passive participation and active contribution empowering users to influence what gets built while driving more engagement across the platform.
Role
UX Designer
Project Type
Feature enhancement
Project date
2023
project Goal
Create a community-driven system that transforms user-generated ideas into validated challenges, increasing engagement while expanding Topcoder’s opportunity pipeline.
The Problem
Topcoder lacked a structured way for the community to contribute ideas and influence what challenges were created. While users could participate in existing challenges, there was no clear path for them to propose, validate, or elevate new ideas—limiting engagement and slowing the growth of the challenge pipeline.
The Approach
To address this gap, I designed a community-driven approach that allowed users to submit, discover, and validate ideas through upvoting. This created a lightweight feedback loop where the most relevant and high-interest ideas could naturally surface. I focused on defining clear user flows and interaction patterns that made participation simple while ensuring ideas could scale into structured challenges. This included designing pathways for idea submission, visibility, and progression into the challenge pipeline. The solution balanced flexibility for user-generated content with enough structure to support consistency and feasibility as ideas transitioned into real opportunities on the platform.
Discovery & Research
Discovery was intentionally lightweight due to team constraints and a clear opportunity identified through user feedback. A community request for more social interaction highlighted a gap in how users could contribute to the platform beyond participating in challenges. With limited resources, I focused on quickly validating this direction by analyzing existing engagement patterns and aligning with business goals around increasing participation. This led to the opportunity to design a community-driven system where users could submit and validate ideas, enabling faster execution while still addressing a meaningful user need.
Design Process
The design process focused on aligning the platform to LD3.5 while supporting complex, data-driven workflows like scheduling. I leveraged existing system components where possible, extending them to accommodate high-density information and real-time decision-making needs.
Given the complexity of workforce planning, I prioritized clarity and efficiency structuring the experience to surface the most relevant information at the right time. This included designing modular layouts, scalable components, and clear interaction patterns that could support evolving use cases.
I also worked closely with product and engineering to integrate Sidekick, Walmart’s AI assistant, directly into the workflow. Rather than treating AI as a separate feature, I focused on embedding it contextually ensuring it supported decision-making without disrupting the user’s flow.
This iterative approach allowed us to balance system consistency, technical feasibility, and user needs while delivering a cohesive and scalable experience.
Idea Tab for Dashboard
I approached the design by embedding the Ideas feature directly into Topcoder’s existing ecosystem, ensuring it felt cohesive with current workflows. I introduced a new navigation entry point and designed a structured listing experience that allowed users to browse, filter, and evaluate ideas at scale. The interaction model centered around simplicity—users could easily submit ideas, view details, and upvote concepts to signal demand. These signals were designed to inform which ideas should evolve into challenges, creating a clear connection between user input and platform output. By leveraging existing design patterns, I was able to move quickly while maintaining consistency, focusing design effort on defining the end-to-end experience and ensuring the feature could scale as engagement increased.
Designing a Scalable Idea Submission Experience
I designed a structured submission flow that balanced ease of contribution with the need for high-quality, actionable ideas. A key focus was reducing low-value or duplicate submissions, which I addressed by introducing guidance that encouraged users to review and engage with existing ideas before creating new ones. The experience was intentionally step-based, helping users provide the right level of detail while keeping the process lightweight and approachable. The result was a scalable contribution model that supported both user engagement and downstream evaluation, ensuring ideas could be effectively surfaced and transitioned into challenges.
The Result
The Ideas feature introduced a new layer of community engagement by enabling users to contribute and validate ideas directly within the platform. Early internal feedback indicated increased interaction around idea discovery and voting, suggesting a shift from passive participation toward more active contribution. The feature also established a clear pathway for surfacing high-interest ideas, supporting the expansion of the challenge pipeline. While long-term metrics were not captured due to team changes, the feature laid the foundation for a scalable, community-driven model that connects user input to real platform opportunities.
Reflection & Next steps
The Ideas feature introduced a new layer of community engagement by enabling users to contribute and validate ideas directly within the platform. Early internal feedback indicated increased interaction around idea discovery and voting, suggesting a shift from passive participation toward more active contribution. The feature also established a clear pathway for surfacing high-interest ideas, supporting the expansion of the challenge pipeline. While long-term metrics were not captured due to team changes, the feature laid the foundation for a scalable, community-driven model that connects user input to real platform opportunities.
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