Because Product Design

Because is an e-commerce marketing platform that uses no-code solutions to help users customize their sites. It has a variety of customization options that are backed up by a powerful rules engine which allows content to be displayed dynamically, ensuring that the right customers see messaging relevant to them.*

Role

Product Designer

Time

2022 - 23

Type

Full time work at Because

*My Product Design work for Because is under an NDA. Work shown is publicly available promotional material and designs already released in the app.

02 Product Design

Role and Responsibility

During my time at Because I worked as the sole product designer in a fast-paced start-up environment.

  • Took the software from minimal offerings to a more robust customization platform.
  • Helped lead product vision by participating in high level blue sky meetings.
  • Created both pixel perfect and quick designs to meet the needs of the development team.
  • Did product testing and worked on various bug fixes.
  • Managed the product’s design from end to end, ensuring that nothing was just shipped and forgotten about.
  • Performed research including competitor analysis and monitoring and review of customer use of launched features.
  • Ideated and iterated designs using low fidelity mockups, sketches, charts, notes and other brainstorming methods.

03 Collaboration

Working Together

As the first full time product designer employed by Because, I worked to create a design process from scratch in collaboration with the Software Development Team and the Head of Product. This included introducing a design system and handoff measures.

  • Worked closely with Software Development, Marketing, Design, and the company’s CEO using Trello, Linear, and Notion to define project requirements and keep everyone on the same page.
  • Managed business and customer goals to make sure the customers got the best experience while also being mindful of the needs of the Because team and business goals.
  • Scoped design projects to clarify goals and define MVPs and beyond. This helped the team know what to build first and what we could wait on when launching certain features.
  • Led web design projects from scoping the project to helping build it in Webflow.

04 Achievements

Growth

I helped Because grow from approximately 50k ARR to 200k ARR over the course of my employment. My software designs led to clients like Sanrio, Chomps, TB12, OhSnap and more.

Product Offerings

Expanded product offerings from a simple product page banner offering to a robust software that supports adding and replacing content across a customers site using dynamic rules. I also helped expand the A/B Testing functionality to allow customers to understand how their content is performing on their site.

    Dynamic Rules

    Developed the fundamental rules engine used by the software. These rules draw from product data, site visitor data, cart data, and data from other integrated e-commerce solutions. It is designed as an intuitive, no-code way for customers to define when and where they want their content to display on their website.

    02

    Making sticky cards

    To create a stacking effect, you will required to use the 'position: sticky'.

    Apply 'position: sticky' to 'c-card' element and apply at least 1px for the top position.

    By now, you should be able to see the cards stacking on top of each other while you scroll down the page.

    05 Reflection

    Lessons

    Projects are not precious and many things that get designed will never see the light of day. As a designer it’s important to know when let go and when to advocate for your designs.

    It’s important to understand limitations in resources and work with them, not against them. A big blocker when working at a small startup was the ability to facilitate proper using testing. Due to finances and short timelines, features were pushed live without much testing. Adapting to this limitation, I had to be diligent when researching my projects and finding existing sources of information. I monitored the usage of new features closely to see how customers used them and found any errors with the design that I could fix with a quick follow-up design. Another method I used was making sure that the first iteration of the feature launched was only an MVP. This often gave us time to assess the value of the feature before investing too many resources into it.

    Proper communication with team members is vital to make sure that everyone is on the same page and stakeholder goals are being met. To do so it is important to have an open line of communication without disrupting fellow employees workflows.

    Credits

    Graphics from trybecause.com designed by Wendy Li.

    01 Overview02 Product Design03 Collaboration04 Achievements05  Reflection