User-Centric Design/Development

As an early stage product targeting service shops, experimentation and time to market were key to rolling out Riptide's messaging app and achieving product-market fit. To accelerate velocity, I played multiple roles — designing, prototyping, and developing MVPs for messaging, onboarding, and payment using Angular and Bootstrap. Beyond frontend deployment, I conducted user testing, employing services like UserTesting.com, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager to spot breakdowns and analyse and calibrate performance metrics.

Onboarding

Onboarding efforts focused on signing up verified small businesses and delivering "aha" moments to boost user retention. Journey mapping the entire onboarding experience including the static brochure site and first user experiences provided context for onboarding screens and promos to educate users about valuable features. The onboarding app itself (built with Angular) emphasizes a mobile- and desktop-friendly experience, incorporating learn flows and email-free validation for a friction-free authentication process.

Messaging App

Satisfying customer- and supplier-business communications requires keeping conversations and customer information close at hand. To emphasize this goal, I diagrammed and prototyped optimal task flows. The resulting chat UI enables users to reveal conversations, notifications, messages, and customer profiles progressively, avoiding information overload.

Print Driver

Shop owner research revealed opportunities to integrate messaging into existing workflows. Frequent print jobs originating from shop management applications motivated development of a print driver that could send Riptide messages and documents (estimates/invoices) to customers and physical print jobs contemporaneously. Design artifacts produced included screen mockups shared with a remote Windows development team and a product brief to educate users.