As Design Lead, I consulted for Fi a smart dog collar company offering users the ability to track their pet's GPS location and vitals. The company's product organization was experiencing some turmoil as the team, at that time, suffered a number of layoffs of key team members. In the interim period, I was asked to fullfill the lion's share of responsibilities that might normally be distributed across a larger design team. This actually provided me the great opportunity to work across all the company's digital touch points, from its corporate website through to the Fi native mobile application. As I worked across a variety of product design initiatives I was also able to influence corresponding marketing materials that would be released to promote the new features we were building.

The Fi brand and application was originally designed many years before I intersected with the client team. One of the resounding overarching pieces of feedback / direction that I was given by key stakeholders upon beginning work was that the application design and branding felt dated and didn't necessarily serve the dog owner mass audience. I found this was true as I became more familiar with the industry category evaluating the other similar brands. As I work through many of the design initiatives, I also worked to reconsider the brand tonality and the design system applied to the application making incremental updates throughout.

As we all know no two dogs are quite the same from a personality standpoint, and canine breeds also have varied traits and unique characteristics one to the next. The first design initiative I was asked to work on was the design of breed specific website landing pages that could be used to target dog owners by breed. The breed specific website landing pages were meant to serve as a personalized entry point for site visitors who owned specific dog breeds thus creating a delightful experience that would ultimately bolster adoption / sales conversions.

The next product design initiative I contributed to was improvements made to the in app 'Lost Dog Mode' flow where subscribers would first be alerted to there dog breaching the safe zone in proximity of the owners mobile device, and be prompted to track there dogs live GPS location. During this exercise I worked closely with engineers and key stakeholders to understand recent technical advancements in real time GPS tracking capabilities that the Fi ecosystem was newly able to leverage. The experience and interface design improvements were made to bolster clarity of user interface elements within the lost dog mode interface and increase ease of use.

After a dog is lost and ultimately retrieved by a user leveraging the lost dog mode feature, there is an opportunity to solicit user feedback regarding the aforementioned experience. User data showed that users who enter lost dog mode leave the associated flow for one of two reasons. The first reason being that users may incorrectly assume that toggling the feature on and off will foster a better result and improve GPS accuracy, which is woefully incorrect. The second reason is to successfully complete a session once their dog is found. We designed this portion of the flow to lead with a directive warning message when the user chooses to end lost dog mode to prevent them from toggling the feature on and off. Next, they are asked if they successfully retrieved their lost dog, to discern whether to solicit feedback or prompt the user to submit a testimonial.

After conducting several internal brainstorming sessions, and conducting stakeholder interviews with internal customer experience and finance teams within the client organization. I set out to redesign the user experience and interface associated with checkouts and membership offering selection both in app and via the corporate website portal. The most truly difficult aspect of this particular design initiative was to solidify the desired direction for improvements to be made across this flow as there were many internal stakeholders contributing to the ideation regarding changes to the tiered subscription plans. Once there was some consensus regarding these logistics I was able to look across the entire checkout flow and design a variety of improvements.

Another feature I designed would enable users to share / add dog profiles in real time. In the case where two dog owners meet in say the dog park and want to connect this feature offers them the ability to do so. This relatively simple feature was designed the enable a user to share unique QR codes with other users, driving that user to a dog profile page where they can choose to follow said profile. Additionally, opting to follow another dog profile would inherently also enable users to follow one another's dog's activity.

Additionally, I contributed to designing a relatively simple experience that would enable users to share referral codes with friends. In order to promote the use of this feature it was also decided that the Referrer would earn $1 toward their subscription cost for every successful referral. The flow designed enables the user to share a unique referral code with others via text, email and social channels. Additionally we designed this flow to enable users to both track their successful referrals and share their referral as a unique QR code in real time as well.

As with many of the design initiatives I contribute to, I worked on developing several different directions for the sharing of referral codes in app. The first of the alternate directions worked to imagine this flow existing on a single page state within the application. This direction was pursued to explore a simplified MVP version of the experience that would require minimal engineering effort and leverage pre-created overlay patterns to support user selections. The second direction we explored worked to repackage the opportunity to refer others into a flow that might resemble using a physical punch card where the user can activity keep count of successful referrals and quickly send new ones from a single state within the application.

During the course of my time consulting for Fi, I was often asked to work with their marketing team to build a variety of marketing assets used to promote and showcase new feature releases and ongoing promotions they'd often run to drive collar purchases and subscriptions. Above you can see some of the nice, on brand results our teams achieved working together across marketing emails, animations applied to a variety of social channels and other feature specific promotions.