I led this project from conceptualisation to completion. It was my responsibility to own the entire UX process, and to also manage the development team through the full build to ensure the execution of the completed user experience.

It was born from a research project that studied the impact of technology in retail and provides a suite of tools to the retail and hospitality industries to optimise many aspects of their daily tasks. Early research on these industries revealed a lack of quality digital tools created specifically for this demographic.

In addition to the above, this project through a three year process has been a startup company that I have brought from an idea and sketch on paper to a fully launched and live product. I was responsible for every step in between, from early UX, to mobile and web app builds, marketing website, company branding, market research, AWS management, pitching competitions where I successfully won funding from the Irish government and resources from Google, Stripe integration, client demos and so much more. It was a commitment that I made to build a startup and I have learned a lifetimes worth of experience from it that can be applied anywhere in product design.

The early stages of research, mostly through direct interviews with small business owners, revealed a reliance on paper as a method of organising many aspects of their company’s management. It became apparent that retail in particular was overlooked with digital tools, mainly due to the on the go nature of the job. The tools that did exist were poorly executed or focused primarily on scheduling. The majority of the businesses we spoke with used paper to inform staff of shifts, announcements, task management, reporting etc.

The solution and idea from the beginning was the build an all-encompassing digital tool to suit these industries by including them in the ideation phase of the project.

This project truly grew in stature from the very early stages of brainstorming on whiteboards. The objective early on was to create a solution for the above mentioned industries. To do this, a long period of research was required to validate the product. With a sizeable initial investment, it was my aim to first discover if a solution was required by the industry, and second to then test and create that solution.

Methodologies included early stage research into industries, interviews with potential business owners, paper prototyping, In addition I like to use Flinto prototyping, which provided to me an early working version which I observed business owners using. The above all provided me with the results I needed to begin then mapping out flows and creating wireframes. The below are wireframes at varying stages of the process with using different software such as XD and Sketch.