“All the ingredients are in the kitchen but you haven’t made the meal”: the essence of the pivot.
This is article 4 of 8 in the Pivot Strategy Series. Hectic launched our web app in Feb 2021 and released an updated design in fall 2021. This series explores the research and decisions that influenced our updated design and strategy.
By early summer 2021, we had validated our strategy with an MVP, determined our product and marketing paths forward, determined the metric to measure product-market fit, and now it was time to actually do the thing. Do the pivot. Make the change that would turn our MVP product into the category leader, the default app of choice for all freelancers.
But how? What does that look like? To answer this question, we turned to a few pieces of feedback, including a good one and a critical one. The good one: “I feel like this app balances perfectly all the things a freelancer needs. It’s well organized, it doesn’t overload me with more information than I want or need, and it is enjoyable to use.” And the critical one: “I don’t think you’re there yet. The design doesn’t look professional and I get lost in the app because the navigation is confusing.”
The two messages “it’s simple” and “it’s confusing” appear to conflict, but they’re both true. It was a simple web app but it could have been better. A third piece of feedback brought into focus the apparent conflict between the two: “All the ingredients are in the kitchen but you haven’t made the meal.” It was a perfect analogy that resonated with all of us as soon as we heard it. The app flows from finding a new client, getting that client under contract, managing a project, and getting paid. It all works together, it flows to the next step in the process, all the features are simple, and we presented it all in a cheerful, colorful design language.
And it mostly worked. Except for when people got lost in the navigation. Or didn’t want to send their client a cheerful-looking invoice. Or thought the design felt unprofessional. Or were confused by multiple ways of doing the same thing.
We decided this was the problem to focus on. We believed that it would be worth spending months of research, design, and development to make essentially the same app but with improvements in navigation and visual design. Yes, spending 4 months building more features in proposals or invoicing would make a small percentage of people stay that would have left us before, but the big missing piece is that we needed to be simpler, easier, cleaner, and visually stunning.
The end result looked like this:
1. The most obvious difference is a visual design update. The UX in this project list didn’t change, but the look is entirely different. It feels more professional, more polished. We were going for a fun and friendly feel, but the updated design called for pulling back on fun and being simpler, limiting the colorful fun to the logo and colors that give information like client or status.
2. The next major change was in the navigation. I have an entire article about navigation later in the series, so I’ll keep it simple here and just point out in the original version, you navigated through opening an app menu in the header, but in the new version there is a left column navigation that can show page titles or collapse to just show icons.
3. We completely redesigned the information architecture and embraced tabs to increase focus and decrease clutter. The original client detail page had sections for invoices, proposals, and every other feature on a single page. It was too overwhelming and we created focused mini-pages with tabs.
4. We got rid of of breadcrumbs and put some interactions in full-page modals. In the first design, things like proposals or invoices were a navigation level down from the client or project, and clicking back would bring you to the client. Turns out that’s less user-friendly than it sounds, so we got rid of the navigation and instead made these features modals that close and then you’re on whatever page you started at, whether that’s the client page, invoice page, project page, etc.
When you’re a startup with limited runway, choices like these can be a gamble. It could be that our new design doesn’t improve signups or retention and our precious months of work would have been better spent making our core features more robust or building new features that people had been asking for. You have to hope it’s worth it.
But how did we end up needing such a re-work in the first place? That’s the subject of the next article in the pivot strategy series.
Photo by Max Delsid on Unsplash
