THE PUZZLE

Grip6 makes belts, socks and wallets. They do three things, and they do them damned well. In fact, they like everything to be done well, and they tasked us with buidling them a custom app that would boost their sales and delight their customers.

They wanted customers to be able to bundle products in any number of innovative ways - not just upping average order value slightly but multiplying it significantly.

THE PROCESS

I spent some time talking the project through with the client and put together a detailed scoping document detailing the functionality required. Grip6's store runs on Shopify, and the functionalities they wanted and needed had to - at the time - be custom-made.

I then put together a team of front-end and back-end developers, and took on the role of UX/UI designer, as well as project manager. I had each team member scope out their role, then vetted their processes and asked them a series of careful questions to ensure that we had covered all of our bases.

When estimating costs, I put a calculation in place that gave the client a pretty accurate idea of the maximum amount of time it would take to recoup their initial investment in the piece of software we were going to build.

Once the client was happy with our scope and cost, I started the design process by mapping out user journeys and flows to guide both the client and developer through each part of the process a customer would undergo during a purchase.

I then put together detailed, mobile-first wireframes of both the user-facing and merchant-facing front-end interfaces, and had the client look these over. I made sure to keep things in line with the look and feel of their site, and paid attention to best practices. Once they were happy, I meticulously designed each component of the UIs.

I then managed the development team as they worked on putting this brand-new product together. We hit one or two roadblocks, but navigated them successfully. We went through round after round of user testing to iron out any bugs.

Soon, we were ready to launch. The client wanted to launch around Black Friday, a time when e-commerce stores are put under a notorious amount of pressure, but generally make huge profits. We encountered a bug in the middle of the night, but fixed it in record time.

In the end, the client made their investment back in a couple of days (our maximum estimate was around three months).