Sub-trac'd
Companies think they're so slick, tacking you on with so many subscriptions, well well... who's slick now?
NOTE: Below is just a summary of this project and it's high-fidelity designs. Full design process details are available here.
The Gist
Sub-trac'd is a product that helps you track your subscriptions in a quick and easy way, but until now it only had a desktop platform. I was tasked to bring over their features into a mobile experience with the goal of doubling their current userbase. Sub-trac'd was also looking to expand from the US market to the German market as well, and thus needed some strategies to tackle the nuances. Over the duration of 90 hours, I designed, tested, adjusted, retested and finally readjusted the design to a masterpiece of refined UX (well maybe not a masterpiece, but testing results do say it performed well!).
My Roles & Responsibilities
• Product Manager: Full project timeline planning and project responsibility
• UX Researcher: Competitor research + target market Research
• UX Designer: Full mobile app design (wireframe, high-fidelity design and interactive prototype)
The Deliverable
• A refined high-fidelity mobile app design
• Interactive prototype
• Summarized research and strategies for German market expansion
Takeaways
1) Transforming a desktop experience to a mobile one still requires UX research and design work to ensure the quality of a product on one platform translates well and consistently onto another.
2) Creating a successful experience for additional markets (ie: Germany in this case) requires proper understanding of cultural differences, language and behaviors. A simple translation job does not guarantee success - localization requires a proper team backed with appropriate market research.
Learnings
1) A project plan with well-defined deliverables at every major stage keeps work consistent and produced with quality.
2) A project plan should have some leeway to allow for unexpected changes, hiccups and wonky time estimates for deliverables - out of a 90-hour budget I allocated about 4 hours for leeway, this gave me the peace of mind to refine the design work to a better quality without the idea of looming deadlines.
4) A well-defined target audience helps immensely in honing the product's design - you understand better what your users truly need this way.
5) Having metrics set out in advance to measure out during user testing helps in understanding whether your new design is objectively better than what was there before.
6) While an initial design may sink like Titanic when tested with users, the iterations that follow can quickly jump up in quality - don't be discouraged, and adopt the feedback into improved designs.
7) There will always be improvements to be made after each round of usability tests, but you will start noticing diminishing returns and more successful and smoother interactions/task completions from users. That's when you know that your design is good to go into development.
