Something that wasn’t quite decided yet was what the first phase of this new app would be. There was a large majority that were trying to make Usana’s subscription services the first phase, but some people wanted it to be our regular shopping experience instead. Because of this I took on the task with my managers help of figuring out what the alternate shopping experience could like like. Heres a link to that case study if you wanna dive in of the details. My manager and co-designer had already defined a pretty solid LoFi for the subscription option (at Usana we call it “Auto Order”, but it’s a subscription for Usana products. I also helped continue to refine the LoFi designs and helped with the move into higher fidelity, but let’s start with the LoFi.

> Probably split up the shopping project and Auto Order project, but maybe include links to each one as a reference.

More LoFi Stuff

More Hifi Stuff

More Handoff Details

More stuff learned

#### Summary?

Content

Alright so I started working on a stupid mobile app and basically poured my soul into it, only to get shafted by the company I gave so much energy and resources to. Which ya know, that’s capitalism for ya, and we keep supporting it. Yikes


But moving on to the app.

When I joined Usana, work had already been started on trying to define some of the strategy and the wireframe and other low fidelity designs. I quickly dove in to the project cuz I really enjoy just diving in and learning as much as I can while I go. It was a wild ride, but also a ton of fun. I had a lot of ideas to try, but I quickly learned that many of them wouldn’t be possible due to our limited resources and fragmented brand.

Usana is a legacy company (just celebrated it’s 30th anniversary while I was working for them) and they have a lot of moving parts. Their digital presence is also fairly outdated, but it’s been growing quite a bit since I started and it’s been cool to watch the transformation.

There was still some disagreement about what part of our digital experience to deliver in a mobile app first. Some people wanted to focus on our subscription service called “Auto Order” and others wanted to focus on our shopping experience including checkout, a cart, etc. The subscription had more traction so the designers were already starting to move towards that experience, but I volunteered to do research and exploration into how we could support the shopping experience. We knew that either way we would be developing both pieces of the experience eventually and so all work done would be used and valuable.

#### Shopping Exploration



#### Subscription Designs

While I was researching the shopping experience and creating sketches I was also helping support the work for the designs being worked on for the subscription service. I like to keep my process really open and often hop back and forth between sketches, research, and more high fidelity designs because sometimes one option matches better the flow I need. So even though we were working on some designs that were already defined in a low fidelity state I was trying to keep exploring and pushing the ideas a little further. I always enjoy exploring lots of options and pushing things past what might already be accepted as “the way” and was trying to do that here.

I came up with some ideas that were accepted and others that people liked but that didn’t seem feasible to support because of different limiting factors within the company. One of these was that our brand wasn’t well defined in a lot of areas including illustration and I wanted to see if we could start building that out cuz I knew that it would really push our mobile experience to a different level if we had custom illustrations that aligned with the brand. Here’s some of the ideas we explored.

Pushing for illustrations didn’t go where I wanted it to, but it did start to open up the conversation a bit more and I could tell that there were multiple other people who wanted to use illustrations. We started to try and define what our illustrations could be and I started to learn more about the people at the company who were involved with the brand and also began to see how much work we needed to define the brand more solidly. It was a really helpful experience being new to the company and team and I’m really glad that even though the reason I started the conversation wasn’t accomplished, that I still learned a lot of valuable things that I may not have learned so quickly if I didn’t dive in and push for something that interested me.

That’s a guiding principle I have which is to lean in to the things that make me feel energized and excited cuz that’s how I can really get in the zone and make amazing stuff (and my speed of work increases too). So I was really proud of myself for digging in to the illustration stuff even though it was pretty unprecedented and new for Usana and people seemed kinda confused and unsure about exactly how to approach the conversations I wanted to have.


With all that exploration happening we were also moving on with solidifying the designs and coordinating with stakeholders, devs, and other partners to make sure what we were creating would match both the business needs and user needs as best as possible.

People were really excited about what we were building but thankfully the app wouldn’t come in to the spotlight for a while which helped us to really focus on narrowing down the experience as deeply as we could. This was helpful because while Usana has built 2 apps in the past, neither of them were created with UX design helping to guide the process. They were using buggy tools that made it difficult for the developers to keep supporting the code, and they were very excited that for these apps we were really honing in building experiences for both iOS and Android that used native components and elements. It was really important for use to have space to consider all of this newness and to build a better process then we had in the past. It also helped us have space to start building component libraries for mobile which was a new things for Usana too. Basically just about anything that needed to be updated in our process, needed to be, and it was a really exciting (and sometimes stressful) time to be part of something so big and impactful!

I had been using Figma for a couple years as my primary design tool and was really enjoying the robust features that it offered, but sadly when I joined Usana they were using Sketch. Which was okay, but ultimately lacked a lot of the same features that really made Figma feel magical and fun for me. I championed out Android component library in Sketch and learned the ins and outs and constraints that Sketch had pretty quick, but I definitely was hoping and suggesting a switch to Figma as often as I could.