How a simple audit reshaped the entire app
While performing an audit of the Greenlight app, I noticed a lot of discrepancies across similar screens. After talking with the engineering team it became clear that we had a ton of technical debt, and no concept of cohesion across feature sets.
I started simple: How can we componentize / standardize our current experience? It started with simple page templates, and conforming to content blocks and containers and led to so much more.
stability & standardization
The first step was to address some common known issues: Tappable areas that were lacking any form of affordance, migrating from a web style tab navigation to a more mobile native tabbar, adding a common action element to the navigation.
hard conversations are the path to change
It was a start, but after reviewing with the engineering team it started to make more sense to not just go for parity, but to reorg the entire app. Since nearly every page would be touched, why not spend that time on a more scalable initiative.
So I started workshopping a new direction. SwiftUI had just been released and I want to capitalize on some of the new features, but also work within the constraints of what was available for Android.
a plan was set,
time to work
Now that we had a structure, I started working with the engineering team to review some of these changes, I also met with the data team to review user behavior and what opportunities they thought were available.
With these insights in hand I put on my product manager hat and developed a plan to get us to platform stability before some other major features came along.
Here were the core KPI’s I wanted to address:
1. Increase performance & continuity
2. Increase feature discoverability
3. Establish scalability
4. Testability
the launch
There were many conversations, debates, and concessions between the steps above and the launch, but I'm happy to talk about those in person.
Since the launch in early 2020, for the most part the experience remained in tact, and weathered a litany of new features and multiple rotating design teams.
This was an exercise of love, not just for our users but for our team, and even though I claim to have led this process it was a team effort.
The engineers weren’t just developing, but finally had a say in what they were building.
The product team was able to feel like every part of the app was elevated.
The marketing team was given real estate and not just relegated to email messaging.
