Case study · Mobile product design
Making meeting requests easier to manage.
At Katch, I explored a Slack prototype for testing availability and redesigned key iOS flows ahead of a planned launch.
I very much enjoyed working with Goksu for a couple of months when he came on board as a product designer, he was my main partner in discussions about the overall product value proposition. Goksu demonstrated strong analytical skills and could easily grasp the whole user journey from the first day of his work, which really impressed me. Thanks to his user empathy skills, he helped us redesign the navigation of the app and worked on a slack app which is still to be implemented. Goksu can challenge ideas that make him a great team member and I can envision he is going to have a great career in user experience design.
Anna Blasiak, Head of Product
Katch
The sole designer on a small, early-stage team.
Katch was a US-based startup with fewer than 20 employees. The product was in private beta when I joined as the only UI/UX designer. I worked with Anna Blasiak, Head of Product, and two developers across its iOS app and a proposed Slack experience.
I joined daily stand-ups and brainstormed with Anna. I also created a Slack prototype to learn about user behavior and redesigned priority iOS features, discussing the designs with developers and handing them off to the team.
Test availability where people already work.
After onboarding, Anna and I explored how to test the product idea and its primary and secondary features. Slack seemed a good place to prototype: it was relatively quick to build, and much of the intended audience used it in their professional lives. The prototype was designed to support research and observation; it was never shipped.
We distinguished global availability, a signal to everyone, from local availability, a signal limited to previous requesters or a selected group. In a large company, an unrestricted signal could invite hundreds of meeting requests. Selective availability offered a way to keep that demand manageable.
The team later redirected the work from Slack to the iOS app. The reason for that change was not shared with me at the time.
Focus on the flows needed for launch.
The executive team set a Product Hunt launch date. To meet it, we worked in short cycles, redesigning important features and preparing engineering handoffs almost every other day.
Leadership was concerned that the product had become crowded with features. Anna and I concentrated on three selected flows: Availability Hours, Marking as Done, and Sending Meeting Requests.
Timely reminders without another switch to manage.
Availability Hours helped people receive reminders at times that worked for them. The redesigned flow removed the need to keep turning the feature on and off, reducing a recurring task in the app.
Clear inactive requests from the inbox.
Marking a request as done removed its inactive card from the interface. The team used checkboxes to select cards under the launch deadline. I questioned that choice: checkboxes were an unusual pattern for this action, and they disrupted the home screen's visual alignment.
A focused way to compose a request.
Sending Meeting Requests was the third priority iOS flow. The designs show the compose screen and interaction; no separate outcome measure was recorded for this feature.
Research exploration, then launch-focused design.
The Slack idea produced a prototype for exploring availability, while the iOS work concentrated on three flows the team considered essential for launch. The Slack prototype did not ship.
