Context

As a Digital Designer at Designit, I was fortunate to be part of the team that worked on the MVP of avatarin's telepresence service. It was an exciting opportunity to collaborate with a client that has set out to enhance the potential of humanity by introducing new abilities through avatar robots.

avatarin's next-gen travel experience involves remote-controlled robotic avatars that enable teleportation to remote locations, allowing people to see, talk, and walk around as if they were physically present there.

Challenge

The main objective of the project was to assist avatarin in defining and designing their minimum viable product (MVP), with the aim of expediting their launch-to-market timeline and enabling real user testing.

Avatarin had developed an alpha version of their service that required improvements before it could be released to the market. Our team was engaged to scope and build an MVP which would encompass multiple touchpoints. The design solution had to cover an array of digital and physical channels, cater to diverse user types, and offer a seamless experience across all these channels.

Approach

We worked as a unified team with avatarin's stakeholders, product team, and developers to establish a consistent design language for the website, desktop app, mobile app, and the 'newme' robot. Our goal was to deliver the necessary design assets to implement the service, while helping avatarin to adopt a design mindset internally.

Setting the Foundation

Our approach commenced with setting the foundation through understanding avatarin’s vision and requirements and mapping out the journeys of different user types across touchpoints. We identified the features that should be included in the MVP and prioritized them based on user needs, technical feasibility, and business goals.

Agile Design Sprints

Using an agile methodology based on Scrum, we ran two-week design sprints, in which we created wireframes, high-fidelity screens, prototypes and design assets.

Throughout the whole process, we worked collaboratively, constantly communicating our design decisions with various stakeholders to maintain alignment. We also met with the developers biweekly to hand over design assets and ensure technical feasibility.

Continuous Improvement

We provided continuous support by utilizing user feedback to improve the service, introduce new features and types of experiences that have the potential to broaden the service's appeal to new user groups and increase revenue.

Outcome

We provided avatarin with several interactive prototypes of the MVP and a design system that enables a consistent experience across various digital & physical channels, allowing to serve multiple stakeholders, including business owners, business staff, and public users.

We empowered avatarin's product and development teams to build solutions using the design system, adopt a design mindset, and set up a design team internally.

Our collaboration helped avatarin to launch its service in the Japanese market, accelerating the time to test their business ideas and gain direct feedback from the different users.

My role

As a Digital Designer on the project, I contributed to many aspects of the design process, including scoping, feature definition, wireframes, user journeys, user flows, screen design, and prototyping. I also facilitated developer meetings and design reviews with stakeholders, and participated in sprint planning.

In the final phase of the project, I assumed the role of project owner, overseeing project efforts and leading the team of designers. As part of this role, I was responsible for tasks such as project planning, prioritizing the product backlog with the client, and facilitating sprint planning meetings. I actively promoted cross-functional collaboration between team members and stakeholders, facilitated internal feedback sessions and design critiques. Additionally, I provided mentoring and hands-on support to our designers to ensure that we meet all deadlines and deliver in consistent quality.