Upperstudy
Jun 2020 - Nov 2020
I joined Upperstudy as an opportunity to be mentored by my friend Tim Van Damme who I had worked with at Abstract. I was looking to sharpen up my product design skills, and quickly. Upperstudy was a perfect fit and appreciate the opportunity greatly.
After working with a few startups through Upperstudy, I felt confident pursuing other opportunities.
I was introduced to the founders by my friend Tim who I had worked with at Abstract. I was looking to sharpen up my skills, and quickly. Upperstudy was a perfect fit and appreciate their mentorship. After working with a few startups through Upperstudy, I felt confident pursuing other opportunities.
I was introduced to the founders by my friend Tim who I had worked with at Abstract. I was looking to sharpen up my skills, and quickly. Upperstudy was a perfect fit and appreciate their mentorship. After working with a few startups through Upperstudy, I felt confident pursuing other opportunities.
What's Upperstudy?
Upperstudy is a mentorship focused design studio that mentors early carer designers while pairing them with early-stage startups.
The Client - Otto
I was introduced to the founders of Otto through Upperstudy. They were bringing experience from previous successful consumer fintech ventures and a goal of launching something where they felt a gap in the market still existed.
At the time, Otto had no branding, interface, or design system so we were able to start fresh together.
Max and Andy brought educated opinions on branding and UX along with strong technical and product knowledge with them and were a pleasure to partner with. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to work with Otto at such an early stage.
Goals • 90 days
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1. Develop a brand and visual language
Through a series of explorations, zoom meetings and reviews I was able to work with Otto to develop a foundational set of brand guidelines that would enable us to more quickly make decisions later on. Initially we workshopped in Notion and completed a questionnaire of likes and dislikes together to create rails for visual explorations.
2. Apply that direction to an MVP iOS app
Thanks to our conversations around visual identity and our freshly established product guidelines, I was able to get to work building out Otto’s initial user flows, design system, and onboarding.
While early, building out a set of components allowed me to adapt to feedback and implement changes across the onboarding flow quickly. This was especially valuable as we were moving from medium to high fidelity designs.
Results
Over a short time we were able to deliver a really wide scope of work and solidify the key product experiences for Otto’s upcoming launch. Since working on this project I've come a long way with interface design but the experience design still feels strong.
