Helping Carputty get from zero to one and through $24 million in seed & series-A funding.

The initial proof-of-concept for the Flexline™ application flow was designed early on before we had customers and the before our team had been fully formed. After gaining a few initial customers, the UX and development shortcomings became glaringly obvious.

Between the poor user experience and constant bugs, we knew an overhaul was in order. We were losing customers, and the dev team was exhausted.

By this time, Carputty had accumulated a lot of great data, some early adopter fans, and now it was time to capitalize on the knowledge we had.

I leveraged a variety of tools to meet our goals. I used tools that I was familiar with and also discovered new tools that we would integrate into our processes.

Now that we had a well-defined problem space and general path toward our goal, I set out to make sure the bets we placed would pay off. I conducted user interviews with existing customers and non-customers.

I dove deep into competitive research to see what other best-in-class application flows were doing. I pulled out insights that would not only be useful for this project, but also for the alignment of product-market-message fit across the organization.  

The rubber finally meets the road. I was now armed with enough research and strategy to move forward with design.

After some rough whiteboard sketches, user flows, and wireframing, it was time to move into Figma. After periodic check-ins with the team to give updates and get buy-in, the next step was to do user testing and gather more specific feedback.  

To build a higher-fidelity prototype than what Figma allows for, I used Protopie. Protopie supports interactive inputs, Lottie animations, and the use of conditional logic, giving the user the illusion that it’s a “real” app.

With a finished prototype, I ran unmoderated user testing sessions first. I wanted to ensure our moderated testers were “getting our best,” so I used Maze to find the easy-wins and quickly fix them.

After I ran moderated user testing sessions, we were very confident in the solution I had designed. I processed all the insights from the sessions and put them into documents for the team to review and reference.

After iterating on all the feedback I received, I finalized the designs and handed them off to the developers. We had a formal hand-off meeting with the entire engineering team so I could explain design decisions and open the floor for any remaining questions or concerns.

To ensure quality in the final live build, we instituted Storybook for our components and a VQA blocker column in Jira.

After sending our shiny new application flow out to the world, we measured the impact with Google Analytics, Fullstory, and Metabase. I built custom dashboards in Fullstory to hunt down bugs, assess funnel performance and see usage statistic trends.

We were very happy with the outcomes we achieved. Our quantitative and qualitative metrics improved across the board. Most importantly, we established a solid baseline for how we would work together and build product going forward.

The next order of business was to restructure the dashboard and prepare for the updated application flow and other new features. In the process, I updated the styling and refreshed our design system.