Trellis AI (Consumer,  0→1 MVP)

AI reader app for educators and students gets a redesign for engagement and delight

Role 

UX designer 

Time

Oct 2023 - Dec 2023

Team

2 designers
1 founder
2 engineers

Skills

UX and UI, Collaborating with cross-functional teams, Developing design roadmap, Auditing

The task at hand was very clear

Founder wanted 2 critical userflows to be redesigned for optimizing for engagement
and creating delight

Anchor the team. Show agency.

With a short contract and a remote start-up team, often deliverables may get derailed. To bring structure, myself and the other designer, we maintained a Google sheet, that was our go-to evolving design roadmap. We would take a timely review and track our tasks. This document anchored the whole team, also, it was important as it showed agency and accountability to the founder. 

I attended daily stand-ups with the team. Every alternate day, we had design sessions, design reviews to take feedback from the founder and weekly team share-outs with the engineers.

Audit

Apple Books (Grid heavy interface)

We studied reader apps like Apple Books and Libby to draw notes on how to design a Grid-heavy UI wihout making users overwhemled. 

Solution space

P0 Library - optimize for engagment

This was the first and the most central experience of the user journey which then led to an audio book playback. 

Since we were dealing with a lot of book tiles, one set of iterations focused on multiple visual permutations of Books stacks- vertical, horizontal, grouped, listed, etc. This helped us design with non-overwhelming layout for users. Second approach was to incorporate these layouts to create user friendly - Mixed panels. 

Design decisions

Solution space

P1 Audiobook - create delight

"Art on the museum walls" was the Founder's vision. We aimed to welcome the reader into the author's world but elevating their Book in an artistic and poetic way.

Our exploration involved sampling various gradient styles, blending monotones and duotones. We selected diverse books with darker and brighter shades to refine our wireframing experiments, ultimately settling on a definitive duotone gradient. This gradient created a visually dynamic effect, capturing the beauty of the book colors.

Design decisions

Finalized duotone gradient was approved by the founder and engineers. 

Final outcome

Empty state 

Library  

Audio playback 

As we headed towards the end of the contract, we were happy to have delivered on our scope within the timeframe. These deliverables were piloted by the engineers on the TestFlight app first. 

Introspection

Things that went right

1. Product road map was golden, anchored the team.
2. Early collaboration  with engineers saved time and effort 

For future

1. Developing typography and iconography, refine UI
2. Validate the designs with a user interviews to collect qualitative and quantative data.

For more details, feel free to reach out at samlele27@gmail.com

Thank you for visting and let's get in touch.

 

Find me on LinkedIn or shoot me an Email at samlele27@gmail.com

Designed by Sampada Lele