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I love to nurture growth, in myself and others. This project was done earlier in my career, and I’ve chosen to leave it here to illustrate career advancement and expansion of project depth/scope over time.
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User research and testing, product strategy, workshop facilitation, UI design, and delivery to Development.
I worked with one other Product Designer, two Salespeople, two Marketers, and one Project Manager.
moovel's mission was to help transform cities by providing the most convenient and sustainable mobility software solutions.
I primarily designed for moovel's white label application — a native mobile app that is sold to public transit agencies, uniquely rebranded, and injected with each city's complex transit fare catalog so that they can offer a mobile ticketing solution for their riders.
moovel acquired another small tech company. Then, the Business Development team (not the Product team 🙃) was asked by Leadership to find a place to fit the acquired company’s products into ours, and to make money off of it - fast.
That translated into Business folks forcing along a concept without validating it with users in the market or even clearly defining what success looked like.
The objective of the Business Development team was to introduce an advertising engine to the mobile application - which is the product I'd been the Design lead on for a year and a half. Remember: this app is a simple, successful (by App Store rating standards) utility app for purchasing bus tickets in your city.
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Image description: Later concept designs of a native ad engine within the mobile ticketing app
I’ll admit that when this began, I had my own biases and assumptions around what was best for the end-user and about introducing ads to our users in a utility experience.
I simply didn’t believe it was the time or place for ads. I thought, "Everyone can't be Google or Facebook," and I wanted the initiative to fall flat. Though, a couple months into the project wavering, Product and Design folks started being invited in and asked to really drive the project.
The biggest problem was that, before Designers were part of this project, the team was not centering the end-user at all. There was no problem statement. The team was simply focused on achieving a vague business goal that came from The Top: generate new revenue through ads.
As I began working with the team, the real crux of the problem became clear: How might we use this existing technical platform to craft the most relevant and contextual experience for the user as possible while meeting our business goal?