Influencer Partnerships
Design & Brand System 1.0
The Carro product originated as a way for Shopify merchants to discover which of their customers, email subscribers and social media followers are influencers, then enabled the merchant to easily reach out to pitch a collaboration in exchange for free product and track the resulting social posts. At a point, we also worked on a way for the merchants to convert those influencer posts into ads.
In addition, I created a strategic system for branded illustrations based on a set of reusable graphics that could be assembled in various ways to create the meaning the illustration intends.
This enabled us to quickly create illustrations for in-product guidance and marketing initiatives consist with the brand, that effectively and memorable motivated our customers.
Illustration samples:
While it’s deeply fulfilling for me to manage a team of designers, triage and coach, I love designing every day. My passion for creation is what gets me up every day and excited to get in my chair to work.
On day one at Carro, I began working on a Design System.
The unstructured approach to UI that I inherited was born out of the use of multiple contractors previous to me and was inconsistent and inefficient. In collaboration with our devs, I selected Google’s Material UI design system to be the foundation for our own. A customized version of Material was version 1.0 of Carro’s design system, utilizing established brand colors and typography.
Working in Figma, product design was my sole responsibility until adding additional team members and hiring contractors when needed. To maintain consistency for the user and efficiency in development, I strategically reused established UI and carefully extended it when needed with new elements.
The design system enabled rapid, consistent, quality production of product design.
Making full use of the office environment, we frequently jammed on white boards to establish rough user flows, feature sets and value propositions.
As we formed the product and defined the user flows, product experiences came together quickly and enabled us to focus more on refinement and iteration than construction. The design below outlines the experience of an influencer who has accepted the Shopify merchant’s invitation to collaborate, and walks them through an experience where they indicate to the merchant what they’re willing to do for the collaboration (a post, a story, provide imagery & video, etc.) and sets them up to choose a product for free (in collaboration) from the merchant:
As the first Product Designer at Carro, I laid the groundwork for our growing team.
In the fall of 2019, we pivoted the product and began development of another concept for Shopify merchants: brand to brand partnerships. We used our exclusive access to the Shopify platform as a “sales channel” (enabled us to communicate data about a merchants products into and out of our own system), to facilitate two Shopify merchants to supply and sell (retail) each other’s products… totally digitally… unlike traditional wholesale arrangements. Below, an early version of the onboard flow utilizes both the Material UI system as well as the visual illustration system.
We put flows like this through frequent refinement processes, taking into account user research & observation, data analytics, and strategic product development.
Here (pre-Covid and remote working), we’ve printed out each screen and laid them in order throughout our conference room to make notes.