Shortly about V18
We believe in making outdoor adventures accessible to everyone, everywhere. By supplying high-quality gear, local expertise, and on-demand delivery and pickup, we make getting gear and getting outdoors easier than ever before.
No more traveling with bulky equipment. No more scrambling to borrow mismatched stuff from your friends. No more long waits at the local gear rental shop. Just step out the front door anywhere and do what you love.
This is how our service works
MVP Summary
My role
As the only designer, I’m leading the design of our product and strategy. I facilitated design sprints with the team, qualitative & quantitative research with customers to develop V18’s mission, features, value proposition, and later translated those into our product. I partly owned frontend development and PM.
While providing services to customers, we did many small UX tweaks on our product to test our learnings and assumptions from user research. This flow is challenging to achieve as an early-stage startup, when your development team is working on ensuring that the app is stable, every little tweak in design of our product was a luxury. Fortunately, I have enough confidence as a front-end developer and was lucky to gather a group of talented developers who love giving attention to details. Moreover, we took these design iterations as our way to relax and reflex on our progress.
Good product is Device-Agnostic, not Mobile first.
I always try to look at the feature beyond one device and evaluate my early design decisions by designing it on at least two sizes, desktop, and mobile. I think the modern UX/UI design process should be device agnostic, and if done well, it should scale naturally.
Pitch deck
Snapshot of some of our pitch deck slides. As with everything in an early-stage startup, your pitch deck is constantly evolving. I think the pitch deck is a mirror of the startup. I noticed how much of our feedback, especially on our business model, was coming from pitch deck feedback.
I think that’s something that many founders don’t take into account, to build their pitch deck as a way, to evaluate their business model rather than different it in front of the potential investor.
The winning market is the first step. But scaling requires top-notch logistics!
Apart from a user-facing product, we are building an internal product that helps us keep track and order over our orders and deliveries. For a startup that is partly stepping into the logistic sector, it’s important for us to have a solution that will reduce the number of mistakes and speed up our staff.
I designed a mobile and tablet version of our logistic purposes. Drivers can see daily tasks, assign them, and mark them as complete.
Reflecting back, to embrace the future!
From buidling V18 with every knowledge we had, to seeing how our customers use it, or break it, was an amazing journey, followed by amount of learnings that I’m still processing. As a designer, team lead and business designer V18 helped me to be more aware how businesses work and what is the role of design beyond usability.
