Case Study
How great design is sometimes not good enough
Quick designer / developer team building
Management of multiple stakeholders
Fast sprints every few days
About the project
Vdrop is a video sharing app designed to connect business leaders, sport stars and brands directly to their teams, fans and customers to create meaningful and engaging conversations through video.
- Combine three existing apps into one unified experience
- Collate feedback from multiple streams into iterative prototypes
- Envision future potential and commercialisation ideas and build this into new models for presentation to stakeholders
Initially running as three individual apps, the brief was to envision and create a unified experience for all user levels and foresee a way to combine it all into one app.
I was drafted in to work on an existing app which looked like it was designed by developers. We went through a fast team building session to get an understanding of everyone’s strengths and sticking points.
With little to no design consideration to UX or delicate approach to understanding affordances and signifiers, the customer experience was clunky at best. But the idea was fantastic.
With the CTO leading the charge, we broke down the backlog requirements and implemented a loose scrum process to swiftly iterate version prototypes while still servicing and onboarding paying users in the live app.
We worked fast as a team across borders in Australia and Europe. The strategy was to combine the business objectives flowing in from European stakeholders with the needs of paying customers in Australia.
In reverse, we pushed big ideas back up the chain to show the potential in the wider app idea – highlighting the forest rather than the trees.
Our ‘sprints’ were rapid. I was presenting design iterations in prototype form every few days – merging feedback from Europe with the new ideas from the app team.
The biggest challenge we faced was communicating to the business leaders using the app for a niche purpose that there was exciting potential in commercialising the idea to make it more appealing to a wider audience.
Results
Not all great work sees the light of day.
We had stakeholders on board with the new app designs, and a brand refresh. But it was then they realised they wanted to rethink the full idea – so the project was temporarily shelved.
It was being used by some of the biggest sports teams in Australia with great reviews and engagement numbers. I firmly believed in the app’s potential.
As a designer you have to be prepare to ‘kill your darlings’ and over the years I have forgotten more projects than I’ll ever remember.s
My take away from this project was how much fun working in an agile product team was. We all understood each others strengths and ideas were freely shared built upon. I learnt a lot from them all. It also gave me a passion to look for more work that involved a similar process.
I believe the strengths I brought this project were my intuitive expertise and design skills to make sense of complex and often conflicting objectives. My experience from working in Agency world allowed me to then navigate and direct my part of the project accordingly with a measure of emotional intelligence