Way.com Mobile App Re-Design
eCommerce, Visual Design, iOS & Android App Launch
Overview
This project is a re-design effort for the mobile app that Way.com had launched previously with designs created by an overseas design agency. The main challenge for this project is the fact that my team and I had to juggle between designing both the Way.com responsive web as well as their iOS and Android mobile app. I’ve managed this entire project and successfully worked with our developers to launch this on time within two short months (including responsive web).
Challenge
This was more of a product management challenge rather than a design challenge. My design team and I were only given one month to complete all the re-design of the old Way.com mobile app. The biggest tradeoff from this project is that we could only focus on visual designs, and perhaps if a big issue came up, we’d fix the interaction design or navigation during that time. It wasn’t ideal, but like any startup, we did the best we could.
My Role
I was the product manager and part designer for this project. I had two designers on my design team and a total of 8 developers handling both iOS and Android mobile apps. I’ve done design validation, given interaction design and visual design inputs, as well as aligning and communicating with developers to help launch the mobile apps on time.
Solution
Because the project timeline was so tight, I’ve used Airtable in addition to Jira in order to manage 100+ pages of both designs and developer status in order to meet this tight deadline.
Background
Way.com mobile app needed a redesign with something more modern and intuitive. As a product manager, I had a month to put a plan together and distribute the workload between me and my 2 brilliant designers.
Visual design was the main focus in this project, and we had pretty much no time to do any other interaction design and/or usability testing work. Also, the startup company had made a decision to only have one set of designs for both iOS and Android mobile apps because of the limited time and resources. Some of the interactions had to be universal, rather than native, for both iOS and Android behaviors.
Designs
We changed the red and the green colors slightly to modernize the look and feel of the mobile app. Also, in terms of layout and typography, we added more white space and used various font weights for better readability. Below are some of the redesign efforts completed:
Working with iOS and Android Teams
I was coordinating, communicating, validating, and updating both the iOS team and the Android team. One of the main challenges when working with the developers was, when we were using InVision to convey the interaction from screen to screen, there were always misunderstandings between how we designed it and how they perceived it should work. Luckily, the teams and I had daily communication to ensure that all developers understood clearly.
iOS and Android App Launch
After a month of nonstop designing and developing, both the iOS and the Android app were successfully launched on December 2017.
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