The Team

My Role: Senior Product Designer

Responsibilities:

• Visual and interaction design

• Wireframes and interactive prototypes

• Taking part in user research,

• Illustrations and animations

• Presenting my work to stakeholders

• 1 PMs

• 1 Product Designer

• 1 UX Designer

• 1 Product Strategist

• 4 Engineers

• 1 QA

The opportunity

In February 2016, Prolific partnered with AMEX OPEN Forum and Kettle to help come up with an informed decision to make an all new OPEN Forum app. They had one core problem we needed to solve: their content successfully drove a ton of traffic to the website, but visitors weren't getting past the article page.  So, they challenged us to develop a product strategy for the app that would really engage business owners.

Goals

• Kickstart a mobile community of highly engaged, registered app users

• Become a robust events tool for attendees (pre, during, and post event)

• Plan to scale event intake

• Grow and manage the health of the community

• Keep users retained, while growing the community

Before we started designing, we interviewed 50 business owners, and those who market to business owners at conferences, to understand their needs and behaviors. Our goal in this research was to define a series of problem statements that could present opportunities for digital solutions, and fully understand the mindset of a business owner.

What we learned was that digital interactions aren’t nearly as powerful as face-to-face connections — so we focused on features that would make that easy and safe to facilitate.

In collaboration with a digital agency, Kettle, I established a visual language for the app and designed all planned feature, including testing and research, to make sure our solutions were addressing the right problems.

The last feature I designed was messaging, with interesting concepts like warm welcome, ice breakers, and smart recommendations.

We also explored ideas like a companion Apple Watch app, or a version of the iOS app that would change into a new mode when a user was on-site at an event.

Highlights

1. I wanted this app to create memorable first-time experience, so I created a frame-by-frame animation, that would support content and storytelling. The result was 450 frames of animation that visually embodied the connections we wanted to facilitate among our members in person.

2. I advocated against the predominantly white/male visual language that was the default at AMEX to be inclusive of the full spectrum of races, ethnicities, and gender identities that comprised the OPEN Forum iOS app users. I’m particularly proud that my suggestions proliferated from just this one product to influencing the visual language of the entire branch AMEX OPEN Forum. When I created and presented my alternative approach, it was a truly one of the highlights of my career.

3. To make our product more friendly, approachable and human-like, we created business cards that we used to promote the app during SBO events. And it actually worked — we got many new users!