Designing a Professional Self-Service Platform

Reducing Support Dependency Through Design

Talawa Theatre Company launched Talawa Make to address a long-standing structural gap in British theatre: the lack of sustained, professional support and visibility for Black British artists across career stages.

Talawa Make was conceived not as a single programme, but as a four-stage development ecosystem—Engage, Grow, Collaborate, Sustain—delivered through workshops, commissions, readings, and mentoring. The challenge was to translate this ambition into a digital platform that could support connection, opportunity discovery, and professional credibility at scale, without reproducing the exclusionary dynamics common in creative networks.

As UX Designer, I led the design and implementation of the Talawa Make online community, shaping it as a professional infrastructure, not a social network.

Challenge

The challenge was not technical delivery, but participation design.
Talawa needed a platform that:

• Enabled artists to be visible and discoverable without self-promotion fatigue
• Supported meaningful interaction without being dominated by a small minority of users
• Reflected professional theatre norms, not generic “creative community” tropes
• Balanced openness with moderation, safeguarding, and governance

Research and stakeholder discussions made one risk explicit:
participation inequality—where a small number of confident users generate most content while others remain passive—would undermine the platform’s purpose.
The problem to solve was therefore:
How do you design a professional community where contribution feels safe, lightweight, and worthwhile, especially for early-career artists?

Role

As UX Designer, I led the project end-to-end across:

• User research and persona definition
• Information architecture and taxonomy design
• Prototyping and evaluative testing
• Platform selection and UX implementation (Drupal / Open Social)
• Collaboration with development teams and Talawa stakeholders

I worked closely with Talawa to ensure that UX decisions aligned with the social mission, safeguarding responsibilities, and operational realities of a Black-led arts organisation.

Strategy

The UX strategy focused on lowering the cost of participation while preserving professional standards.

Designing for Participation, Not Posting

Rather than encouraging users to “create content,” the platform was designed so that:

• Participation emerged as a side effect of other actions (applying, attending, bookmarking)
• Users could edit, tag, or respond instead of starting from scratch
• Profiles, events, and opportunities did most of the expressive work

This approach was directly informed by research on online community dynamics and aimed to prevent early drop-off or silent disengagement.

Audience-Aware Access and Permissions

Registration defined three distinct user types:

• Artists (primary audience, full profiles and interaction rights)
• Industry (streamlined profiles, controlled messaging)
• Casual visitors (browse-only access)

This distinction ensured:

• Artists retained control over visibility and contact
• Industry participation supported opportunity flow without dominance
• Unregistered users could explore value before committing

The permission model reflected professional theatre norms rather than open social platforms.

Taxonomy Before Interface

A significant portion of the work focused on taxonomy and data structure, not screens.
Skills, disciplines, interests, career stages, and motivations were defined early, enabling:

• Meaningful filtering and discovery
• Region-aware mapping
• Personalised surfacing of opportunities and events

This ensured the platform functioned as a professional directory and network, not a content feed.

Prototyping and Validation

Prototyping was used deliberately at three stages:

Exploratory Prototypes
Static visual prototypes tested layout, hierarchy, tone, and brand application. These helped align stakeholders on what “professional but welcoming” looked like before development began.

Evaluative Prototypes
Key journeys—registration, profile creation, messaging, content posting—were tested on the development environment with representative users:

• Artists
• Industry contacts
• Platform administrators

This surfaced friction around account setup, messaging expectations, and content visibility.

Beta Validation

A controlled beta with approximately 100 users (artists, agents, casting directors, producers) allowed real-world observation of:

• Contribution patterns
• Navigation behaviour
• Moderation load
• Profile completeness

This phase was essential for refining interaction rules and reducing unintended friction before wider rollout.

Implementation

The platform was built on Drupal, selected for its flexibility in permissions, content types, and moderation workflows.
To support parallel development, I recommended a structured deployment pipeline (Jenkins / GitHub), allowing:

• Features to be tested in isolation
• UX sign-off before release
• Reduced regression during iteration

This was particularly important given offshore development teams and a phased launch plan.

Outcome

Talawa Make Online launched as a professional infrastructure, not a social experiment.
The platform:

• Enabled artists to present themselves credibly and consistently
• Supported discovery of opportunities, events, and peers across regions
• Reduced reliance on informal networks and insider knowledge
• Gave Talawa visibility into engagement patterns without compromising trust

By prioritising structure, permissions, and taxonomy, the platform avoided the common failure modes of creative communities: noise, inequality, and disengagement.