Situational.ly. An idea that grew out of a set of research I conducted around people and their careers.
At some point in our career, we've all found ourselves feeling stuck. Perhaps you face a challenge that is a bit more complex than originally thought. Or maybe you are being stretched beyond your comfort zone. Whatever the case may be, it can be painful and sometimes take quite a bit of time to resolve. However, it is also very likely that others have already been through what you've experienced and developed a solution for the situation. Being familiar with design pattern libraries, it became clear that having a pattern library for career situations would be a valuable resource.
The user for situational.ly is anyone who finds themself working with others. Based on the research I conducted, people who are earlier in their career or going through career transition find these patterns more useful. People who have been in their career longer have typically been pattern author candidates.
Using Lean UX methods, I conducted a number of problem interviews. From the problem interviews, I highlighted the most important observations, placed the details on sticky notes and generated an affinity diagram. Further analysis was done on the affinity diagram to identify various hypothesis I could test. I then proceeded to test them. While iterating, I landed upon the idea of situational patterns.
Initially, the situational patterns were focused only on designers in their career. However, I evolved the concept and created Situational.ly. The current site that is posted is the basic version of the idea. Eventually I'd love to transform the website into a pattern publishing platform.