MoCaFi, a black-owned and led financial technology and product company, specializes in serving the underbanked community. As the pandemic was in full swing, they found themselves in a position to assist municipalities with distributing federal relief funds but needed a partner to help develop an application to meet this need. And they needed it in 5 weeks!
Easing financial hardships one community at a time
My Role
While the client was finalizing deals with their customers, I distilled the envisioned user experience from the project's contractual requirements and objectives. This involved crafting a strategic overview that mapped out both broad goals, necessary features and detailed expected workflows.
Through follow-up discussions with MoCaFi's team, we refined the essential needs, envisioned user scenarios, and identified the critical data requirements necessary to transition into the design and prototyping phase.
Mindful of our schedule constraints, I designed the application at a mid to high fidelity from the outset to minimize the need for extensive revisions. Additionally, I chose to utilize a UI framework to expedite the front-end development process, rather than build a custom pattern library, which we didn't have time for.
Result
Together we built a white-label app that allows a governments and philanthropic organizations to provide individuals and families with cash assistance, mobile banking, and financial programming that create pathways to wealth.
Where are all the pictures man?! Select the Work tab above to view samples.
Project Creation
To track the distribution of funds across various city initiatives, the ability to create projects with individual budgets and identifiers was crucial.
Creating a new project
Single Card Creation
The single card flow enables the city operations team to be nimble and create cards for residents and businesses on-demand.
In the past, it would have taken a herculean effort to account for everyone they could and send a non-changeable file to the printer.
With MoCaFi able to print cards on-demand, this ensured when residents needed funds, the operations team could distribute as tactically as necessary.
Input flow for creation a card for a single resident
Bulk Card Creation
Once the portal was active, it would be essential to get a list of residents to the printer to start distributing the cards with funds.
Using a simple CSV file with name and address (pre-validated and cleaned), I made the process dead simple and usable to anyone.
Input flow for creating a bulk card order
Perfecting supply chain visibility
Cargo Signal is an end-to-end cargo tracking solution that enables supply chain visibility for safe, secure, and on-time cargo. At the time of engagement, the goal was to evaluate platform and existing features for improvements to create a more viable product that could become a B2B SaaS application.
My Role
I led the product discovery and definition team tasked with identifying opportunities for evolving the existing application functionality. Using qualitative research methods, I identified pain points and opportunities for improvement and translated those into proposed solutions.
Outcome
At the close of discovery, I presented my completed work and strategic recommendations for the next phase of work to client stakeholders.
This led to a successful second engagement that saw Slalom partner with the Cargo Signal to implement many of the opportunities identified.
If you're thinking "I'd really like to see some of the work he did now", check out the Work tab above
UI Frameworks Alignment
To speed the next iteration of their application, they had chosen to use Ant Design as their UI frameworks. I leveraged their preference and utilized Ant components as I crafted new feature concepts and reimagined existing views to the UI framework.
Various feature screens designed or updated to leverage Ant Design components
Shipment Reference
One need the Cargo Signal team had was to develop a new method for associating a tracking device with shipment objects. The existing solution was a text field, which was prone to introduce errors due to information being copied and pasted from other sources.
I proposed a solution that allows the Command Center user to quickly build an advanced shipment reference, add tracking devices to this shipment and then correlate the device to the shipment object level based on the SOP of the customer.
Shipment reference creation flow
Modernizing employee expense filing
Overview
Slalom Build offers one on the best summer internships in the tech industry. They bring on young product design, management and engineering students to build out a full project in 10 weeks!
In 2017, before we had design interns, I volunteered to fix the lackluster experience of filing expenses as an employee.
My Role
I led the product discovery, definition and design for both the mobile and desktop apps. I oversaw the implementation, tutored the interns on UI engineering and also put together the teaser video above.
Outcome
Despite having only 10 weeks, the interns were successful in building both the applications. They presented the work to director and C-Suite stakeholders and for a brief moment they considered developing the applications further. Sadly, this would have been a massive usability improvement, but in the end we eventually switched expense tracking providers (and didn't improve usability!)
Reinventing athlete engagement
Overview
The Nike Sports Research Lab wanted help improving the way that they recruited and engaged with participants as they tested upcoming products. The existing method of engagement was cobbled together by way of survey form data being manually added, edited to a database and this led to stale, inaccurate data about the athletes they had invited in.
The lack of a cohesive system was limiting to the broader team initiatives, so they invited a Slalom team in to review the existing process and outline a vision for improvement.
My Role
Following a research and interview phase driven by the lead designer, I was asked to help interpret the findings and create a concept for how the learnings and pain points could be address by a potential solution. Given no access to any existing design system guidelines, I aligned my work as best I could to existing patterns from the Nike.com site.
Outcome
After a final readout, our findings and recommendations regarding a strategic solution were delivered. Nike did not want to engage Slalom Build in a development phase, but over a year later, we heard a partial solution had been implemented by an internal development team.