All of the initial project research was led by myself and one other designer, with some help from our two design interns. Our process primarily consisted of:
Some of the main findings were:
I worked with two other designers to create several personas (10 in total) under 3 different photography use cases:
1. Wedding photography, 2. Soccer parents, 3. Friends taking a trip together.
The entire document of personas can be found here.
Using the resources we'd compiled so far, one other designer and I collaborated to create an initial outline of what we envisioned Manticore's design guidelines and brand traits would encompass. A few descriptors for our design guidelines were: minimal, integrated, inherently social and inclusive. While some of our brand traits were: approachable, encouraging, organized and expert (but not superior). We consistently referenced these guidelines throughout our design process.
After finishing the first iteration of prototypes, I had the opportunity to spend 2 days with the Director of Enterprise App Design, who gave feedback on the current state of our application design and led brainstorming sessions.
We walked through designing for the First Time User Experience (FTUE) and how to know when a product is "good enough" for V1 shipping in order to get real customer data and insights.
We used most of this feedback to design our second version of the application, which is what ultimately went in to production.
I started on the team by assisting with fairly simple UI changes in the codebase, and later moved on to being of 1 of 2 engineers implementing our final UI redesign and all ongoing feature development. The live web application can be found here. We had a "soft shipment" of the application in February 2019 and it was released internally to all employees, as well as any of their friends and family members. We had over 500 signups in the first month and generally received very positive feedback.