Role • Team • Timeline
Director of Product Design • In-House Product Team and Contract Design Team • 6 months
Problem: IRONMAN needed to transform from an events company into a main player in the VR/AR cycling SaaS space, and fast.
IRONMAN set out to enter the space of triathlon training with an app that would exist across mobile, tablet, desktop, and integrate with Apple TV as a luxury experience for committed high performance athletes.
Our small, agile product team collaborated across global time zones to create an IRONMAN branded custom experience in the triathlon cycling virtual training space. Over the course of five months and using an acquired app as a framework, our team worked around the clock to move from ideation to low fidelity and into high fidelity design, shipping key components and features of the app within a few months.
We had the cart before the horse. We needed processes and design systems, and lacked UX research and insight to inform the whole journey.
Challenges:
⏰ Limited time
🗑️ Scrapping previous designs
🍝 Legacy code in acquired app
❓ Lack of design resources
↩️ Mis-aligned team dynamics
🧐 No specific product UX research
Success Metrics:
🚴🏻♀️ Adoption
✅ Current user base satisfaction
🤳🏻 Feature engagement
⌚️ Device Integration
🗣️ Social sharing
🥰 Public sentiment
When I stepped into this role, interface designs and a design system from a contract design firm had previously been created. This was scrapped as it didn't necessarily meet the requirements nor address the depth of the data and technicality needed for this type of training application. We launched into user research with interviews.
The beginning of our process interviewing users to begin building a deeper understanding of what these users wanted and needed out of a virtual training platform.
As I roadtripped from Colorado to California, I binged user interviews like they were podcasts, conceptualizing user personas and learning about what really drove these athletes.
I initiated the bones of a design system, leaning on android and IOS default design components to get a start on framing sections of the app on which engineers were already blocked and queued to build.
We added to a bare bones design system as we went, being as resourceful and lean as possible.
We leveraged components from the previous contracted firm's designs when applicable, and scrapped what didn't work.
I led the vetting and selection of a design firm to expedite the design process for the rest of the app, sprinting through onboarding, competitive analysis, wire-framing and low to high fidelity designs as we raced tight deadlines.
Working between the West Coast, East Coast, and Australia, we balancing budget and time constraints with our designers, making for tight windows of opportunity and high stakes meetings. It was high pressure but also important to me to build a rapport between our team and the other teams as I firmly believe human connection makes the entire workflow between teammates much more engaging, efficient, positive, and successful.
Our team needed to prioritize what we tested and which features to focus on because of tight time constraints.
Our competitive analysis pulled from other players in the same industry and other players in the virtual reality realm.
Engineering agreed that relying on native patterns for the less prioritized features (such as Settings) made sense to expedite getting things built while we tested and iterated on the higher value features.
We relied on the acquired app's patterns that had proven successful and delightful for user from their data, like avatar styling.
We battled close deadlines, acquisition complexities, company growing pains, and building in Xamarin for IOS, Android, and Apple TV.
I managed the processes and communication between our product managers, engineers, content team, marketing team, and executive level stakeholders to keep things moving as quickly as possible while still maintaining the integrity of our design decisions. Amongst so many moving pieces, we dynamically updated meeting frequencies and times, balanced stakeholder and business needs, and tended the roadmap to match the workload and feedback of our teams.
My responsibilities also included budgeting for all things design and UX, accounting for necessary tools in user experience testing sphere, our design firm, subscriptions and user permissions between all of our teams, and being the driver of the process for the new experience.
I managed a contract design team with limited meeting times, so our design reviews needed to be extremely pointed, productive, and specific. We came up with a Figma doc-based review documentation method which worked beautifully to capture feedback from stakeholders and other team members.
As our product team dug into the process of creating the new IRONMAN virtual experience, the most rapid timeline we came up with for creating a cleanly coded, modern, and competitive experience eventually did not align with the company's budgeting for the next year.
Six months after I joined IRONMAN, leadership made the decision to cut losses and move forward with the build of the acquired product.
While we were sad to see our many months of hard work come to a halt, the research and insight we gathered would still be invaluable for IRONMAN to move forward regardless of what parts of the new experience they would use. After the plethora of interviewing and testing we did, our personas that would help them understand how different users would interact with the product and what features would be the most important as they evolved the old design.
We built a network of users for future UX research, identified key pain points and features, and laid the groundwork for documenting and analyzing this data.
We created frameworks for design systems under the IRONMAN brand in the product space, and stretched the company's wings to step into the product world as a modern and competitive player.
Ultimately, the experience of building a virtual game-like application was invaluable and enlightening for the entire team. Our user data, system processes, design system, and patterns would still come to life.
