B2B iOS App for Anvil
Chat Interfaces & Entrepreneurs
I was hired to consult with a startup whose goal it was to create a platform for advice. The concept was that there are a lot of up-and-coming entrepreneurs who were willing to pay for advice from established entrepreneurs (advisors), and that these advisors would be happy to share information for a fee.
Remote design workshops
There weren’t many (free) tools at the beginning of the pandemic, so we made design workshops work with one that was designed for retrospectives. It was great for most things, and we defined user needs and what they are currently served by.
It was rapid brainstorming with voting and doing this work set us up for success during the rest of the UX process.
The team was small…
…and included the Product Owner, Product Manager, me as Design Lead, and an Engineer. It was a distributed team, and we met several times a week to do workshops and have feedback sessions, with the final goal being a concise MVP that we could use to test the market.
Persona development
Through a panel of users, we created few very engaging personas. I’m not always a fan of creating personas this early, because good personas are backed by data. We interviewed several entrepreneurs and made our best guess at what personas were most important to the brand.
Figuring out the brand
We did some branding exercises to figure out the tone of the company. We wanted to have the brand voice figured out early on so we sound and appear consistent when approaching our first users.
We also created some value props, and how our users might be served by them.
Customer Journey
We performed some initial user research in the form of contextual inquiry, and received some really good feedback from users. We got some general ideas of what the user needs were, and focused on a throughout customer journey
Flow & Wireframes
After analyzing this data we felt confident in moving forward to figure out what the first version of the experience should be.
We ordered the importance of features, and balanced that against timeline and effort.
UX / Visual Design / Engineering
This phase all happened concurrently. Using Figma as our main communication method, I could pump out UX, while the Engineer to begin work and I could slowly update the look and feel as it was approved.
It was a collaborative experience where we could continually unblock each other.
Final designs
Onboarding & Launch
We now how a working prototype, and we spent some time thinking about how we could use what we learned in our persona work and mix that with some content snippets to help convert new users.
I put together an animated prototype to get a sense of how it might feel to watch short consult videos, and have a way to take an action and become a user.
The product launched with a small group of ~300 users. It immediately caught the eye of another larger advice platform, who bought the app for their own use.
It was unfortunate that I didn’t get to be involved in the ongoing rounds of the product cycle, but our ideas continue to live on in the advice space.