My Time at Jawbone
I’m a product designer working on Jawbone’s Product Experience design team for the UP system. We use wearable trackers, mobile apps, and the web surfaces to help our users set health goals, change their behavior, and ultimately live healthier.
Most of the work I’ve done at Jawbone is confidential, so I can’t share it publicly online. If you’d like to see more of my work or learn more about what I do, please contact me.
The Design Team
The size and culture of the design team have changed many times since I joined in 2015. Generally, design is structured into three groups: Brand/marketing, Product Experience, and Industrial design through Fuseproject. The Product Experience team is responsible for the user experience of hardware as well as the end-to-end design of all software features. The size and shape of the team have varied greatly, ranging from over 15 to just 3 at its smallest.
During my time at Jawbone I’ve worked with three cross-functional teams, learned from talented mentors, and experienced various leadership styles. Because Jawbone’s products involve both hardware and software, I’ve been fortunate enough to work on aspects of product design for both wearables and digital surfaces. My responsibilities have included research, system design, user experience, and prototyping for multiple platforms.
This fast-paced culture and my shifting responsibilities have allowed me to quickly take on responsibility and ownership of the features I’ve worked on.
Starting Off
My first position at Jawbone focused on projects directly related to our Research & Development efforts. I worked under the Creative Director of New Products and along with our signal algorithms and hardware engineering teams to design wireframes, user experience frameworks, and vision decks for potential new UP products/features.
I conducted secondary research on health and wellness along with competitive analyses of other products. Even more insights were gathered through the user interviews, diary, and usability studies I helped conduct with externally recruited users.
Designing for Wearables
In the Fall of 2015, the company was restructured to combine the engineering and design organizations under one unified product delivery group. We began working in a tribe model, which gave us closer access to our cross-functional counterparts.
I was placed on two tribes, but my time was mostly with the Devices Tribe, where I worked with our Principal UX Designer and Visual Designer to define the product experience for our new hardware product and its integration with the UP software.
During this time, I learned a ton about designing for wearables/embedded systems/multi-device experiences and its territory of operating under multiple competing design requirements.
Selected Projects:
- Wearables: UX & Product Definition (ongoing)— I was involved in proposing strategy, features, and physical requirements for a new hardware product while still in conceptual development. I lead its interaction design and motion design, and assist with visual design.
- Algorithmic Art — I conceptualized and designed a system for displaying animations on the wearable, that uses 99.65% less memory than before, and enables a much higher variation of usable animations in the end product. The method includes coupling duplicated sprite animations with algorithmically-defined timing patterns. I closely collaborated with a firmware engineer for the final implementation.
- Wearable Gesture Detection (ongoing)— I’m spearheading a cross-functional initiative (between design, firmware engineers, and algorithm engineers) to introduce gesture detection in our wearable devices. Using our firmware engineering stack and C, I built a rudimentary, heuristic-based gesture detector that controls the band UI. We are now exploring machine-learned approaches to improve detection accuracy.
New Responsibility Leads to Personal Growth
After a Senior Visual Designer left Jawbone around mid 2016, team needs shifted and I was provided more project opportunities in other tribe I was in — the Science tribe, which works more closely with our UP mobile app software. I continued to balance my time between both tribes.
Selected Projects:
- Internal Design Sharing Tool — After identifying a company process pain point, I designed/developed an internal web tool in 3 weeks that (1) simplifies design-prototype sharing with collaborators & stakeholders, (2) promotes visibility/transparency of the design team’s work & progress.
- Mobile Health Reports — I led design on a health report feature that would help users generate an overview of their health (biometrics, sleep, activity) and have an informed discussion with their doctor.
- Mobile Onboarding — A collaborator for a total redesign of our “Out Of The Box Experience” (OOBE), I prototyped interactions & defined new motion design principles for our new design system.
- Device Settings (ongoing) — Design Lead for the unification and systemization of device settings, and all touchpoints with our tracker in the app.
