DEX Money Movement mobile & responsive web Apps

for banco azteca

Project: as part of frog ventures, frog and momentum machines, startup from SF, worked together to create a mobile ordering app for the innovative, human-less restaurant experience called Creator.

My role and responsibilities: senior ixd in close collaboration with a visual design lead, a strategist and a pm. during this 10 week project as a lean team, we ideated, shared out early, iterated continuously and prototyped most of the mobile ordering app experience. Product strategy and requirement writing, prototyping, client management.

3 mistakes and 3 learnings

1-make triple sure you are on the same page: we had the CEO and main stakeholders participate in weekly work sessions which helped moving fast and furious. yet… clients are still clients and we did not completely make sure they understood the implications of early and fast decisions. once they understood what the ixd model decision meant for their core business they changed course and we had to re-stratgize the whole product. 

2-a product is a product: client had zero experience creating digital products, we had light requirements at best. we did not take the time to create harder requirements and functionality guidelines but started designing under time pressure. after couple of hard weeks and vicious-circles of feedback sessions I sat down and started creating documentation to guide the product decisions. this approach quickly helped internal team and the client align as well as better understand the product we were developing. 

3-finding the balance: unique product vs. familiar ordering process vs. a simple yet quickly implementable one.: my number one pain working consultancy side and doing product design. we tend to lean on to the unique product creation rather than considering user familiarity, usability and build into consideration to ship a minimum viable experience. sometimes, a lot of the times the uniqueness of the design creates unknown risks and is much harder to build which makes it a challenge to see the light of day. that is exactly what happened here. after we strategized the product around meal creation we went too custom on the burger customization interface which was the heart of the ordering process. this has been an ongoing challenge for the limited resources of the startup.