Hybrid Product Manager & UX/UI Designer

Hey there, I'm Chris 👋

I help founders bring their ideas to life by providing clarity to ambiguity, making the complex simple, & turning insights into impact through a human-centred design approach.

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Case Studies

The Gap's Delivery Workspace

Overview

This project is currently in progress with a more in-depth case study coming soon. In the meantime, enjoy a few of the raw behind-the-scenes artefacts used to help visualise some of the complexities involved in this project.

The Gap is an education company that helps accountants move beyond compliance work and closer to business advisory. Gap App 3.0 is a re-imagined solution that bakes education and best practice into a tool accountants can use to facilitate advisory services with confidence. The Delivery Workspace is the heart of 3.0 where this all happens.

Finger-Ink Forms

Overview

Finger-Ink provides paperless patient intake and consent forms for health professionals around the world through their mobile & online based apps.As employee #1 at this early stage bootstrapped startup, I worked across the full product lifecycle and helped grow the company from $0-$10k MRR by digging deep to understand our customers’ problems and working with our small, but dedicated team to discover, design, & develop solutions that truly helped our customers in their day-to-day business.

Identifying the problem

Finger-Ink started as a generic digital forms iPad app that could be used to build and collect responses for any form in any industry. However, with no clear value proposition being offered to a specific user persona, there was only a handful of customers and little to no growth making for an unsustainable path ahead.Something needed to change.By engaging with our handful of customers, we learned that the majority of them were health professionals or beauticians all with a similar need: to collect client information and informed consent in order to provide their services.And doing this on paper was time-consuming & error prone which is why they were using Finger-Ink to begin with.We found our starting point.

Gaining traction

With an existing iPad app we decided to hone in on health professionals as a way to niche down and solve more targeted problems. We developed ready-made templates and made getting started extremely easy for new customers which helped increase adoption rate and our customer base.But we also knew there was plenty more opportunity ready to reveal itself.So we doubled down on collecting user feedback & other insights, such as conducting interviews, on-site visits, setting up event-based product analytics, scouring various online forums, and pulling insights out of our support ticketing system.

From insights to impact

User insights was a crucial part of our design and product development process.By gathering & sifting through these insights, we learned a lot of our customers were using Cliniko as their practice management system.They would fill out various forms using our app, then export them to be stored in Cliniko. Sometimes data was even manually re-entered.How tedious.Looking into Cliniko a bit more, we found they had a significant customer base in Australia, the UK, and Canada amongst a few other places around the world.Here was an opportunity to not only solve our current customers’ needs, but also open ourselves up to a much larger and still targeted market.Equipped with this knowledge, we decided to build an integration with Cliniko so that data from our app could be stored in Cliniko through a seamless experience.It was truly a collaborative effort between our small team of designers & developers, the users we engaged with to help inform our decisions along the way, and with the Cliniko team to ensure it all went smoothly.The Cliniko integration was a total gamechanger for us and helped grow the company from $10 to over $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue.For a 0-1 bootstrapped company this was a huge milestone!And for our customers, this streamlined their day-to-day patient management saving them precious time throughout their workday. As an added bonus, their customers absolutely loved it which made our customers love it even more. #winwin

Further iterations

With user insights being such an integral part of our design & product development process, new opportunities continuously revealed themselves.One of the key insights we learned was that a significant number of our customers were sole operators. This meant our “pen and paper” replacement app, while nicer, still needed a person to be present to hand them an iPad.So the next challenge became “how might we make checking in to an appointment possible without a receptionist?”After a bit of brainstorming and early testing of ideas with a group of customers, we designed a self-serve check-in feature where clients could walk in, be greeted by an iPad guiding them to check in, and notify their health professional along with completing any necessary “paperwork”.Throughout the early testing period we also learned that some businesses accepted walk-ins, so checking in to an appointment was only half the picture – being able to check-in without an appointment was the other half.This insight led to a rather simple solution by offering clients an option to choose between “I have an appointment” or “I don’t have an appointment”, sending them down 2 different paths but allowing a seamless check-in process nonetheless.

Reflections & learnings

There was a ton of learning in this project with one of my key takeaways being the importance of customer insights and more specifically understanding the root problem of your customer rather than surface level symptoms or perceived issues.To help get to the root problem, I learned about the art of customer interviews and how to ask good questions, how to dig deeper, and how to better understand customers problems, pain points, and desired outcomes.This has made me really enjoy operating in the problem space to learn about our customer and put myself in their shoes as best I can (or at the very least, observe).A few of my other key lessons include:

Overall, this was a real "learn by doing" period for me with the guidance of my employer on what it takes to design and build a global SaaS product that customers rave about.Being such a small team designing a global SaaS product, there was a lot of ambiguity and no two days were the same. Being able to adapt was essential and I feel so grateful for the opportunity to receive such a breadth of experience.

Roof Space's Peer-to-Peer Delivery Service

Overview

Roof Space is a peer-to-peer network that connects sports enthusiasts with travellers already on the road with…well, roof space...providing a cheaper and more reliable delivery service.The problem first arose out of a personal experience by a client of mine, Jack, who was trying to ship his surfboard from Christchurch to Gisborne. After being quoted $450 (half the cost of his board), he looked for another way and found someone from a local Facebook group willing to do it for $100.Naturally this sparked some curiosity – surely he’s not the only one who’s come across this before…A new Facebook group dedicated to these sorts of transactions was formed and after 1000+ active members later, we knew this was a problem worth solving.

But first, seek to understand

With an active Facebook group & an excited client wanting to take the next steps, this is where I jumped in to offer my expertise and help bring the idea to life.As with any design project, I always begin with first understanding the context, the problem, and the users’ needs to essentially answer the question, who and what are we designing for?I helped Jack formulate interview questions for his user research efforts to better understand first-hand the problem people were looking to solve by using the Facebook group, why it was a problem, and the pros/cons of doing it through Facebook.Here’s what we learned after interviewing ~10 people:

Pros of the Facebook group

Cons of the Facebook group

Inspiration & ideation

With a better understanding of who and what we were solving for, it was time to start looking at potential solutions.Given this was such a young and risky project, we wanted to avoid re-creating the wheel as best we could by looking at what already exists to find inspiration and then cherry-pick what works, repurpose what we could, & fill in the gaps as needed.

So where could we draw inspiration from? Do we go with the classic Uber or AirBnb comparison?While there’s a lot of similarities of these two, the comparisons broke down fairly quickly. Instead, we realised this was most similar to your typical job board.People wanting to send their gear were like employers listing a job and people willing to drive their gear were like contractors looking for work.Identifying this helped give us a solid foundation to start from so we could focus on what really mattered.

Putting together the pieces

Using the job board as inspo, I was able to map out some user flows of how Drivers & Senders would interact.In addition to the core functionality of connecting Drivers & Senders, we landed on 2 key design principles to help guide our decision making:

Let's talk about impact

Although the goal was a prototype, we managed to quickly progress it to a functioning MVP using Bubble.io based on our learnings, initial wireframes, & user flows.Some key results:

Lessons learned

The biggest obstacle we were facing and continue to face is getting people to make the jump from Facebook to a new platform.Although lots of users expressed concerns about trust in the group, it’s still a challenge for some of them to actually make the leap.The other biggest obstacle we face are hesitations around submitting a photo ID for Driver verification.Again, although users expressed concerns about trust with other members, the new concern is now around submitting a photo ID on a new platform they’re not yet familiar with.Obviously there’s still more learning to be done :).

About Chris

Hey there, I’m Chris 👋

I’m a product designer and digital creator with 10+ years designing and building digital experiences.I work with early stage companies or greenfield projects to turn complex & ambiguous ideas into simple, intuitive digital experiences. I take a holistic approach to my work by zooming in on the details and zooming out to ensure it all fits together.With a broad set of skills, I bring a varied and unique blend of experience to my work leaning on lessons learned from product design, product development, user research, and entrepreneurship.

Driven by my curiosity and desire to make a positive impact on the world, I love solving new and challenging problems that make a real difference. I believe you can never ask too many questions, no ideas are silly, and that play is an important part of work.

Interests

Outside of work, I enjoy spending time outdoors, reading & writing, cooking, hiking, camping, traveling, learning new things, and experimenting with new ideas and various side projects.Surfing is my main hobby and has brought me to some pretty amazing places such as Costa Rica, Panama, America, Australia, and New Zealand where I now live.

Now

I’m currently designing a business advisory platform at The Gap as part of a cross-functional product team helping to discover, design, and deliver reimagined solutions to help small businesses worldwide.

Open to opportunities?

Yes, I’m open to opportunities in-person or remotely and have full working rights for the United States, Australia, and New Zealand where I'm currently based.