Hey, I’m Udit a product design intern at Urban Company, what I’ll be walking you through today is my experience of my first ever project of my internship at UC.

Goal of this project

To clean up the “My profile” section of our app and learn how to use our new design system Bolt. I had never worked with any design system in the past.

Old designs

The old designs look like this, pretty meh right ? hold tight we’re gonna change them in 5 minutes.

Heating up the engine

• Another intern was also working with me to understand the DS.
• The first thing we did was to audit all the info this section of the app has by bringing all the screens on Figma and making a site map.

What’s wrong?

• Then we listed down all the problems we could see on this screen, mainly they were IA problems.
• Today I’ll only talk about the the main screen that shows up when you switch tabs using the bottom navbar. Other screens maybe next time.

Possible solution?

• The next best thing seems to be solving these problems right? We assumed that a user would come to this section of the app to seek help on their last service.
• So we cleared up the screen and put the help center at the top and a block stating how much you’ve saved with UC plus.

Let’s go wild baby

• But..did we really changed anything? These were still list items with better spacing.
• Our lead told us to not get constrained by the 20 year old list pattern and go wild (more on this further).
• So we tried bringing up the last services upfront and a bunch of other wild stuff😏

First heart break

• We went all hyped up to get them all reviewed and got crushed pretty bad. Because we got feedback on each screen but there was no single idea with us after the review that we could move forward with.
• We felt confused, different iterations, based on different assumptions.

• That’s when I recalled — As designers, it’s our job to try all the different solutions possible and move forward with the best. And not to serve multiple solutions and leave it to others to choose the best.

It was time to play defensive

• Then a designer from the team, Mayank, nudged us to the right trajectory again i.e. work on the core problems that we had listed, thanks Mayank:)
• Even if a 20yr old pattern could fix those problems then defend it no need to reinvent the wheel just for the sake of it.

What went wrong?

We were taking feedback from the whole team as hardcore changes and not suggestions/ideas. We never tried to defend what we made, which lead us into a never-ending loop of unnecessary iterations.

New designs

• These were some of the final screens, how we reached them is a diff post. I got the hang of how to use a DS which was the goal.
• I realized that so many iterations could go even into relatively less priority screens when the product is used on a global scale.