Luvocracy

Along with another designer hired at the same time, I helped start the in-house design team. Throughout my time at Luvocracy, I worked closely with the CEO and director of product to define and execute product improvements. I worked on almost every page of the site in some capacity. I helped grow the design team from two to five people. In addition, our improvements to the product grew the site’s population over 100x and improved per-user engagement.

A typical feature improvement started with considering the broad vision and strategy for the next time period, then determining which features might best achieve those goals and loosely specifying them. For some features, we consulted with users (often times our power users) to get their feedback and make changes. I would then start developing a few concepts, refining the best ones into wireframes. For certain features, we brought in users to give feedback on a paper or clickable prototype. Typically a visual designer would create the final visuals, but before we hired one, I would complete the visuals myself.

One of the critical pages I worked on was the main catalog page, our version of the news feed. This was the page where users could see what products their friends were recommending and discover new products and people to follow.

The page we had at the time was confusing to the user (seen in testing and our own internal usage), was not extensible, and was tricky to maintain on the engineering side. I worked closely with an engineer to prototype and test a variety of versions that varied the content and layout of the page. When we launched the redesign, there was an immediate improvement in the key engagement metrics we were monitoring.