Bountiful

Background

Bountiful is a platform for the commercialization of environmental technology. They connect the different stakeholders around meaningful technology innovation and are creating a community of people passionate about solving humanity’s problems through science and innovation. Bountiful provides its community members all the tools and resources to collaborate and get innovation out of the lab and commercialized and into the world.

My role

As the sole Product UX/UI Designer at Bountiful, I participated in all product development and design activities. to ensure that the MVP was ready for launch. From designing new features and a full product UI design, through handoff and management of product development.

Research

The Bountiful team originally intended to design their MVP directly by coding into the site, using their own research. After realizing that it was more complicated than that, and that a UX designer was imperative, I got involved - placing emphasis on the fact that we had to design for our users, whilst keeping Bountiful's vision in mind.

To better familiarize myself with the product and industry, I dove into my colleagues' research notes, and conducted some market research of my own. The competitor analysis below briefly summarizes the different features of competitors and pseudo competitors. I also created a persona. Do to the short timeframe to launch the MVP, we decided to keep a simpler version of the product, focusing on only one type of user, the researcher.

QUALITATIVE TAKEAWAYS from RESEARCh

Going through our research data was valuable and overwhelming at the same time. The founders of Bountiful have a clear vision of what's in for the long haul; we thus had to make use of key prioritization, understanding what is priority for the right now (MVP) versus the "nice to have" and down the road.

Define

After reviewing my colleagues' data, I analyzed it from a UX perspective and synthesized it into deliverables to prioritize users in the design process. To focus the MVP, we decided to target one user type: researchers and grad students. I created the persona, Aaron, based on our research.

This persona served as a continuous reminder of the characteristics of the kind of people who may use Bountiful throughout the design process and made it especially helpful for designing with a "real user" in mind.

Ideate

Sitemap

With a better understanding of our users, it was time to focus on creating solutions. In order to start working towards solution-focused designs, I developed a site map to solidify the organization of pages within the site.

user flows

Using the research findings, sitemap, and developed persona, I was then able to chart a user flow. The flow below shows several main paths for a user:

Design

wireframes

I created a mid-fidelity desktop prototype of the main user flow using Sketch, ultimately switching to Figma since it was easier for collaborative purposes and hand-off on the developer's end. After receiving feedback and implementing changes to the wireframes, I moved on to the visual design phase

visual design

Before I joined Bountiful, the company lacked established brand guidelines, leading to inconsistent design elements. Recognizing the importance of a cohesive brand identity, I advocated for its development and collaborated closely with the development team to establish a unified brand presence.

The UI kit for the web app brings the creative vision, brand and UI design together.