The Team

My Role: Design Lead

Responsibilities:

• Defining the collaboration process

• Creating a consistent and on-brand visual language for all cross-platform products

• Designing frictionless delightful and accessible iOS experience and overseeing web design

• Communicating and presenting progress on product design across all streams of work

• Taking part in ideation and strategy for service and features additions and improvements

• 1-3 PMs
• 1-3 Product Designers
• 1 UX Designer
• 3-4 iOS Engineers
• 3-8 Web Engineers
• 2 QAs

The story

In 2018 Prolific Interactive partnered with The Wing (a co-working and community space for women) - and I was lucky to lead the design effort on that 14-month long project. The Wing was in a very exciting phase. After their initial funding in 2016, the company was expanding quickly — opening new locations, and multiplying memberships.

The opportunity

The primary goal was to build and launch a mobile app for iOS, and then improve existing websites (member and admin portals, marketing site). Our ambition and overarching goal for the project was to turn The Wing into a product company, where digital products are part of the bloodstream, not an afterthought. When we started The Wing didn’t have a product team or knowledge about the process and effort it takes to deliver the product.

High-level goals

• Retain members

• Strengthen community

• Reduce friction

The process

To understand existing products, services and processes, we integrated our team with the organization. Through stakeholder and user interviews, testing prototypes and analyzing the existing landscape, we agreed on what pain points were and how to address them.

During the kickoff we defined the process, mapped goals, aligned on the list of features and roadmap, tools and a visual language. We decided to show only working files and builds while sharing the progress (no time-wasting fancy presentations necessary), as a part of educating The Wing on what the product process looks like. We decided to start with Happenings, and expand from there.

Happenings

I’ll use Happenings (events) as an example of our approach. This is the core offering and the main way for members to connect. To improve it, we had to address it holistically on multiple levels, including:

• designing the way events are being presented to members to make it informative and exciting;

• developing frictionless functionalities; and

• changing the way Happenings are being structured, and how they are being announced.

Part of it was changing members’ behavior around Happenings to be more considerate and mindful — to remove the “RSVP rush,” encourage people to un-RSVP when they could no longer attend, and properly manage their guests. That required changing The Wing’s internal and external communication, the way they are onboarding new members as well as developing and improving digital tools that support it. We also created feedback mechanisms to allow us to improve the service in an informed fashion.

• 93% Onboarding completion (containing a robust profile creation flow) for new users

• +24% conversion from RSVP to check-in

• New feature Bookmarks lead to 74% conversion from bookmark to RSVP

The Wing’s internal product team was growing quickly, and we had to figure out a way to communicate and collaborate while both teams were constantly growing. Prolific team was growing as well, at some point reaching 20 engineers across 3 countries working on iOS and web platforms. It was challenging, but also crucial to keep everything synced and removing blockers immediately.

Another thing to confront was time. We had to constantly optimize and test to make sure we were going in a good direction. Making products look on brand while being forced to customize as little as possible was challenging as well.

The outcome

We helped to initiate and guide hiring processes that led to creating a self-sufficient, incredibly talented internal product team, making The Wing even more independent and in full control of how to shape the products. A year after the project started The Wing product team had 14 people and the digital part of their offering was an integral part of life and culture in the company.

We rebuilt their back-end architecture to support the company’s growth, built iOS app, completely rebuilt admin and member portals, as well as helped with designing the Marketing site - the face of The Wing for non-members. As the last feature we launched Messaging in the iOS app and member portal, which led to higher engagement and volume of new connections.

Beyond the qualitative experience of a newly-designed app with an improved onboarding flow, event booking, and a recommendation engine, The Wing started to see strong quantitative data in under 8 weeks since launch.

Member engagement was great, installs, new users, session length, profile completion - all numbers were hitting our estimated goals. We’ve seen a big lift in event attending.

Appy Award 2019

The Wing app has won the 2019 APPY Award for excellence in app design in the Home/Garden/Interior Design/Lifestyle category.

Members tweeted:

Some of the excitement people shared on the day of launch. By far one of the most rewarding moments of this project.