II. My Role

My Approach

Within the product development cycle, UBDI had already validated its problem space, formulated a hypothesis, and defined its feature set. I joined at the beginning of the UX phase, grounding my work on the following mindset:

Wearing Multiple Hats: In a pre-seed startup, responsibilities are incredibly fluid, with each member pitching in to support wherever they can. While my primary focus was designing UBDI’s consumer product, I also contributed to initiatives across marketing, operations, and engineering. My involvement in these roles gave me more context into the company, team, and customers, allowing me to become more thoughtful and empathetic as a designer.

Championing Usability: I established frequent review cycles with the engineering team to enhance the usability of the mobile app, leading to several quality-of-life improvements. For example, during a routine audit, I identified the absence of micro-interactions like pull-to-refresh and scroll-to-top for several pages. This led to a quick fix that provided users with a navigation experience consistent with similar social apps.

My Process

A. Empathize

To better understand UBDI and its users, I spent the first few weeks of my internship working with marketing and customer support. I audited our social campaigns, PR materials, and design components to get a feel for the company’s brand philosophy and visual identity, which center around playfulness, vibrance, and simplicity. On the customer side, I worked with our CS lead to address questions, feedback, and complaints on Intercom. 

Additionally, I set up 1-on-1s with sales, design, and engineering leads to align on UBDI’s vision and level-set on the work accomplished to date. These meetings helped me forge relationships and better grasp how the teams come together to push an initiative forward.

B. Create

I emerged from the context phase with an understanding of the customer needs and business opportunities that UBDI addresses. Using Figma, I designed, validated, and iterated on these features, actively collaborating with my lead designer, PM, and engineer to solicit feedback from a technical and business perspective.

My design efforts over the summer broadly fell under two categories:

Exploratory Design:

My first design project was UBDI Insights, a feature enabling users to navigate through a series of visuals from the social accounts they link (think Instagram Stories). As a 0-to-1 product that diverged from the existing interface, Insights required a more conceptual approach. I started this process through notebook sketches and brainstorming sessions, drawing inspiration from experiences like Spotify Wrapped and Facebook's Year in Review. 

Production Design:

For features acting as an extension to the current interface, I reused existing components to maintain consistency and scalability. For instance, when building in-app permission dialogues and modals, I leveraged our design system to lower engineering effort and ensure updates were shipped quickly. Similarly, I repurposed content from our B2B partner portal to craft the v1 of the UBDI web app.

It’s worth noting that these categories were not always mutually exclusive. My final project involved designing Community Profiles, which did not have a pre-existing experience but needed to follow mobile UI patterns. In this case, I balanced exploratory and production design by generating freeform concepts as a starting point, validating them with XFN, and bringing in components later in the process to clean up my screens.

C. Handoff

To facilitate a smooth transition from design to development, I collaborated with a developer to write detailed documentation for each feature. This included specs for font styles, margins, padding, and touch targets. For exploratory designs, we also captured any relevant interaction patterns like animation curves and durations. Finally, I set up a recurring cadence with the engineering team to walk them through the proposed user flows and cultivate a shared understanding of the target UX.

D. Handling

After a feature was shipped, I participated in post-release testing to ensure the update functioned correctly in the live environment. My approach focused on triggering edge cases to validate usability across various devices, resolutions, and scenarios. For bug reports funneled through Intercom, I logged corresponding tickets on Instabug and provided customer updates whenever a fix was deployed. This role ensured that my prototypes were consistent with the final in-app experience.

My Impact

With each project, I earned more trust from our product and design leads to independently make decisions influencing UBDI’s desirability, feasibility, and usability. By the end of my internship, I had contributed to the release of three new features for 40,000+ users:

• Web App: Designed the first iteration of the UBDI web app, introducing the consumer experience to desktop. This product shipped in October 2020.

• Community Profiles: Conducted market research on profile pages, developed an end-to-end user flow, and ran usability testing to validate my prototype. Pitched the concept to company leadership and secured buy-in. This feature shipped in September 2020.

• UBDI Insights: Led API research and crafted over 40 screens to visualize data from sources like Amazon, Twitch, and Coinbase. This feature was leveraged in an experiment to validate user demand and pivot to a new concept (UBDI Data Bank).