Design Collaborators
Objective
As Wisdom Panel’s first internal product team, our job was to reimagine WP as a more consumer-friendly product that could stand toe-to-toe with our rapidly growing competitor, Embark. This would include a complete rebrand, UX overhaul, and an entirely new application platform.
Primary goals:
Turn the tide on Wisdom's damaged reputation in the pet DNA testing marketing
Appeal more to a general consumer market without compromising scientific integrity
Improve user engagement and conversion
Constraints / Challenges
Very tight timeline for the initial launch
Brand new engineering team, many of whom were straight out of bootcamp
There was some internal strife with the old guard who preferred that WP remained a more straight-laced, breeder-focused tool
Complexity—we had a lot to learn about dog DNA within the first month. Luckily, we had some amazing geneticists and veterinarians on-site to teach us and validate our solutions
Original Design
Breed breakdown only displayed down to 12.5% resolution and offered very few details or context.
The user interface was often extremely vague and esoteric, requiring excessive hunting and clicking to expose all of the information.
Many hero elements were not very mobile-friendly, and the monochromatic color theme was both inaccessible and constraining.
Super-rapid development
Given the amount of complexity we had to solve for in a compressed timeline, we had to be super-scrappy and collaborative. Each major feature was a two-week sprint, with the exception of Ancestry which we expanded to four weeks.
Design solutions were solved together on whiteboards and paper, often in realtime. Our design sessions and reviews included design, engineering, product, scientists (R&D), and marketing. It ended up being an excellent example of how to make the concept of 'Open Design' work.
Group strategy session
Making sense of the WP infrastructure
Daily DNA classes
Making friends is important too
Story mapping exercise
Provisional Persona: Purebred Parent
Provisional Persona: Mix-breed Parent
Provisional Persona: Dog Breeder
Two Larry’s and some stories
Design ideation session
More ideation...
Dot voting
IA whiteboard sessions
Whiteboarding Ancestry feature gaps
Whiteboarding initial IDP and onboarding requirements
Look! A wireframe! 👏🏻
SSO authentication & onboarding flow
Implementing SSO across the Kinship verticals proved to be very challenging, as no two Kinship products shared the same codebase or authentication model.
We also exposed a major issue with sharing the same password between domains, as users who used their bowser password manager could potentially get trapped in a never ending loop of forgot pswd / change pswd / forgot pswd and so on.
After much debate and horse trading with our Kinship stakeholders, the engineering team proposed bypassing passwords altogether and just use email confirmation links (magic links). An imperfect solution, but ultimately better for our users while we worked with Kinship on a more stable, centralized SSO solution.
Coco design system
We worked with the engineering team to build out an extensible design system, which we documented across (first Abstract then) Figma, Zeroheight, & Ember Freestyle (similar to Storybook).
Once the system had a strong foundation of base components and patterns, the design team, engineering, and even product stakeholders were empowered to quickly explore new ideas and build rapid prototypes to test with our user base.
Collaborative handoff flows
We created detailed user flows and interaction guidelines for nearly every feature, as well as focused prototypes for communicating various micro-interactions and transitions. Engineers had full Figma access, and participated in flow validation, documentation, and often even some design.
Coco illustration system
We partnered with the Kinship brand team to build out a new illustration system, based on some initial work I had done for the Wisdom D2C site.
D2C store
Our team was also responsible for designing and maintaining Wisdom Panel’s D2C site. We worked closely with the marketing and brand teams to keep the store up-to-date with fresh content, while consistently optimizing elements, layout, and UI to improve customer engagement and conversion.
Homepage
Product Display Page
Wisdom wins
Wisdom retrospective
I’m glad we…
Improved our reputation in the consumer pet DNA space while maintaining scientific integrity
Created a robust product platform that allowed for rapid research, ideation, design, and execution of new features
Raised our Net Promoter Score from ~45 to 76
Launched Wisdom Panel for cats 🐈
Created a product that brings joy and helps the lives of pets
I wish we'd…
Spent more time improving the Health and Traits features. There was a lot of exciting research and exploration coming out of our R&D team that would've provided a ton of benefits for pet parents
Implemented some of those wicked dog finder / pet community features we explored. They didn't test as well as we had hoped, but I felt that these community features could have ultimately evolved into something very special
