Grabbd

Product Design Internship

Starting at a Startup

I didn't know what to expect going into my first product design internship at a startup. With Grabbd, a social travel app, I had the incredible opportunity to absorb the bustling startup culture during their exciting app relaunch. As the only product design intern on the team, I took full ownership of user testing and high-fidelity design experimentation. Since I wore many hats, I even had the chance to practice my graphic design skills by designing Grabbd merch and launched a brand new college ambassador program to expand our social media reach!

User Testing

The relaunch of the app was the biggest design change that Grabbd had ever seen, and we wanted to gain the feedback from both new users (who had ever seen the app before) and existing users.

Goals:

1. Examine how the revamped design influences the current user flow.
2. Discover points of friction and unintuitive interactions.
3. Identify bugs and technical issues before launching.

Methodology:

1. Release a user testing survey for existing users about their user experience with the older version of Grabbd.
2. Interview 6 existing users and 6 new users to understand how the new version of the app changed the Grabbd experience.

After collecting quantiative and qualitative data from user testing, I categorized the findings and pain points for existing users and new users:

Pain Points:

1. Instagram story slideshow is confusing and unintuitive for some users.
2. Issues connecting/importing with Instagram
3. Users cannot customize lists as much as they'd like.

Pain Points:

1. Categories on the Explore page aren’t personalized or customizable
2. Instagram story slideshow made the overall design and flow more cluttered.
3. Grabbing a place and adding it to a list took too many steps.

After drawing trends and insights to identify pain points, I translated them into a set of opportunity areas.

Oppurtunity areas as presented to Grabbd investors and stakeholders.

Brainstorming

Since activity-focused events and promotions were already in the works for the next beta version, I decided to focus on two opportunity areas: slideshow display and list capabilities.

After sketching some low-fidelity screens, I created high-fidelity explorations while keeping the visuals consistent with the brand identity. Unfortunately I can't get into any more detail about the work that I did, since it's under NDA. If you'd like to learn more, please feel free to email me at ch746@cornell.edu!

Some Key Takeaways

1. Fully understand the context and business priorities before designing. When I jumped straight into designing without understanding the context of the problem, I quickly found that my assumptions often didn't align with my project manager's vision. Understanding Grabbd's priorities and context made it much easier to design and enhanced my confidence as a designer.
2. Work beyond the tasks given to you. While I was able to take ownership of the design tasks that were assigned, I also wanted to explore out-of-the-box designs that didn't quite fit Grabbd's priorities at the time. My side projects trained me to think outside the box and they ended up being considered for future implementations in the app.
3. Challenge your design decisions. After getting feedback for my first design iteration, I realized that there were elements in my designs that were overcomplicated and unnecessary. As I'm brainstorming, I need ask myself "Why is this feature necessary?" so that I can have a clearer focus as I'm designing.