When I met with the founder of Kahane, he told me his vision was to create an app where people could interact more meaningfully with the businesses around them. I worked with his team to hone in on a specific, actionable problem we could take on to develop an MVP to show potential investors.
Determining the singular problem we wanted to address was challenging. The travel and place discovery space is vast and while the team had broad ideas for their app, we discussed a few different angles to determine what exact problem the team wanted to hone in on for the MVP.
Through our conversations, I saw that the team continued to come back to overwhelm. It’s currently difficult and time consuming to determine places to go using the multiple platforms that exist today.
The client wanted to create an app that compiled information about a local business from different resources, with social layering and visual storytelling.
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Before I joined their team, some preliminary research had been conducted in terms of competitive analysis and talking to potential users, but the information gathered hadn’t been captured anywhere.
While I had the team try to retroactively write down some of the insights they had gathered, this was tough and I ultimately thought it would be best to guide the team towards a process by conducting and capturing the research work (competitive analysis and interviews) I felt would be informative.
Understanding the landscape and shortcomings of existing apps was an important step to see where my client’s product could make a difference. While the team was including a huge range of apps as potential competitors, I picked a few to focus my evaluation on in the travel and place recommendation genre.
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The team was keen on getting started with designs right away, but because the problem nor the solution seemed well defined, I pushed for interviews to better understand what user pain points we were solving for. I conducted 6 interviews within a day to make sure this didn't take up much time.
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The first screens we focused on were the feed card components and the place specific page to hone in on what value we wanted to add.
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Due to our time constraint, with the research we had and the team's ideas I needed to put out a first prototype to start showing investors as a proof of concept for the founder's vision. The idea was to create informative cards and place-specific pages for those who want information to plan (Curators), and a map function for those who want to be able to stumble upon places and get the necessary information (Explorers).
The founder was keen on getting feedback as soon as possible, so we brought this initial workflow to a few different people to guide our next steps. I handled conversations with fellow designers, the founder spoke with potential investors, and we both sat with engineering and users.
Post feedback, the founder felt it was imperative that we move to a video solution to differentiate. We moved to an immersive screen experience for the feed and a split screen video-map for those who prefer to see things locationally.
The team was content with this as an MVP to continue getting feedback on from potential investors and users, and begin marketing work to gauge sign ups. I asked to be kept in the loop when they spoke with engineering to learn about next steps for design.
Working with a start up team was an incredible experience, but came with challenges. The team was vocal about the importance of the design process, but in practice and under the feeling of time constaint, would push back on the need for fundamental steps.
Because the team was leaning on me to guide the design process, I had space to spend time doing small scale versions of things I found too important to skip, like user research. I would then show how this informed better design decisions. The client was appreciative after the value was shown, but there were still times when I had to respect the client's asks though I may not have necessarily agreed with them.
Ultimately I was there to build their vision and we, though at the beginning stages, were able to do that.
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