I worked with Cubic as their first product designer on the team. I wore many hats as it was small startup with a team of 6. Cubic was didn't have a single design when I started with them. They were still validating value proposition and market fit.
This was the first project I experienced an 'aha' moment of how business goals and UX goals are so closely related.
Disclaimer: Many screens below display the name 'Zingo', this name was inherited by the original investors. After user testing different names, Cubic was used as the new company name.
Many parts of Latin America are still catching up to the E-commerce craze that has been part of North American’s life for so long. There is currently no way to easily search for, discover, and utilize warehousing space in a flexible way. In Latin America, finding a warehouse to store product is quite cumbersome and outdated. The process of agents, brokers, negotiations, and networking create a barrier to a simpler straight forward process.
For small and medium size businesses the process of finding a warehouse that will cater to a small product volume is one of the biggest challenges most start-ups are facing when searching for warehousing. Most warehouses require a minimum amount of product and an inflexible length of lease. Startups are left scrambling to grow their business and reach customers. This is what Cubic is solving.
The first steps of the project were trying to understand the warehouse and logistics industry. This took many weeks. The team and I did tons of research. This included domain research, competitor analysis, and understanding the overall health of the logistics industry in Latin America.
After reaching out to industry experts on LinkedIn and internal networks, I was able to gather enough details to come up with a rough features list and categorized those features into ‘nice to haves’ vs ‘must haves’. This was key to building the MVP and naturally the ‘must haves’ were implemented into the first prototype that was created.
Important questions I needed to help answer for Cubic were:
- Is there desire for this type of product?
- Will the value proposition be visible in early MVP interfaces?
- What are the must have functions and features to attract early adopters?
- How the hell does the warehousing and logistics industry work?
We needed to build a product for warehouse renters, warehouse owners, and an administrator. This would cause each user's interface to be dynamically changing based on all user's actions. To visualize the complex interactions I used diagramming and whiteboard sessions.
I started designing for mobile first. We collected loads of data suggesting that we would need to have an entire mobile experience for the product we were building (for the MVP we decided to skip the dashboard functionality for mobile). Below are some of the first low-fidelity mobile wireframes that were used to fuel more conversations and iterations.
One of the biggest challenges of this product was keeping users informed of the steps involved in the booking process. The dynamic interface creates a scenario where the renter, owner, and admin all have different actions to complete at different times of the booking process.
We needed to create a UI that displayed the correct dialogue and expectation for each user. The challenge was the dialogue is dynamic and can change based on the actions of another user. To help the lead engineers understand the logic, I created what I like to call ‘booking stories’. They are step-by-step cards that each user would see within their dashboard and notify the user of what action to take at the appropriate time.
Once we had a solid MVP to test, the best way to test it was being on the ground in Mexico City and meeting with potential users to hear their insights and how they would use our product. This was the first project I worked with where I had to combine both usability tests and value proposition testing into one session.
By participating in contextual inquiries some of the users behaviors we discovered were:
- Their day to day to tasks
- Their goals and motivations
- What distractors pull for their attention
- How much time and tolerance they are have to test a new product
Below are some cool shots of the team testing the product in the companies cool offices and warehouses.
Using the huge amounts of qualitative feedback we received from our in-person testing, I was able to move faster with design iterations. The product finally started to take its final form.
The data we collected answered many questions. Most importantly, the question of “is there desire for this product” was answered with an overwhelmingly yes.
After we returned back to the states, we were able to move quickly with iterations and continued remote testing with the same users from Mexico.
After pushing the MLP to production, within 3 days we had our first 8 organic sign ups. It was such a great feeling. My favorite learnings from Cubic was how we would not have been able to build such a great product quickly without being side-by-side with our users.
As the interface design phase was starting to slow, I remember reflecting on the successes we had. We were able to answer with certainty some of the key questions we started the project with.
Some of the answers were:
- Yes, small and medium size businesses shared desire for the Cubic product
- When we tested more refined designs, the value of the product and the problem we were solving was clear
- The designs were an elegant solution for our users. Their involvement in research and constant feedback fostered an incredible pipeline of ideation and design iterations