Taste Labs

Collective Intelligence Decision Engine

Taste Labs is the creator of a web and native mobile app that solves the “what to watch” problem in three simple steps—helping users pick what to stream in a fraction of the time.
My Role in this Project
I am supporting this data focused website and native app in the UX space as it evolves it's product offering and users grow exponentially through funding rounds.

Responsibilities included the development and roll out and new features to acquire new users. In an individual contributor Product Designer role I closely partner with the lead Product Lead and Developer Lead on one-week sprints.


Team
Product Lead (Co-founder), Developer Lead (Co-founder), UX Designer, Data Scientist, PR consultant
Audience
  • Current Taste app Users in English speaking countries
  • Movie buffs and couples who stream a lot of shows
Outcomes

Project Approach

‍My role as a freelance Product Designer with startup for various phases of product development evolved

  • Differentiate product concepts with UX audits and user testing scenarios.
  • Defined user stories and in-depth storyboards helped align features to focus on.  
  • Feature development for Web Application then iOS app, performing a study then implementing UI elements.
  • Design framework and start to define patterns to make it easier to jump in and out are necessary.

When jumping in performed aheuristic audit to understand basic product UX maturity. Then read pitch decks received product demos. To quickly ramp up I did a 5 personal user study tasking them to complete the happy path of getting recommendations then creating a profile. Immediate research findings were:

  • Need to balance of introducing new features needs AND simplifying existing value prop.
  • Restraint in onboarding and making decisions of what not to include in happy path.
Current version of web application.
Detailed user story identified opportunities and clearly defined sprint efforts.
"Big Picture" storyboard sketches provided alignment on what the user is feeling and their contexts.

Focusing Product Offering

I had a great opportunity clarify how to translate user needs to product possibilities. We uncovered blind spots and road blocks and prioritized efforts that added product value for investment that aligned to broad vision.

Problem to solve was there is high adoption among one audience for a niche product. We needed to figure out how to scale to another audience using same data science and logic and make a clearer value prop that connects beta with product vision.

The product started as a native mobile app, then pivoted to a web app so we could implement updates and get feedback at a faster rate. Then pivoted back to focusing on native apps. These pivots required a lot of compartmentalizing user expectations within each environment. Learning curve was understanding the behaviours users have on web vs native is different. And limits to engineering and data provided different hurdles.

Focus is shift from individuals to partners/couples.
Onboarding evolved to focus on adoption of new couples feature.

Design Decisions

There are large decisions made, and some still pending. All with the expectation of decisions to evolve as more users interact with newer releases. The following are a range sample of problems we tackled.

What does a checkmark mean?
Using various quantitive studies in Typeform we studied how to create product differentiation with respect to common patterns.

Decisions are pending a beta release.Follow familiar patterns at the risk of losing differentiation OR risk confusion and rely on exploration or lots of explaining

Case for Creating a Profile
In the web app version we tested a lot of low-fidelity prototypes to identify when a user would be most interested in taking extra steps to save their work by creating a profile. And what language clearly hinted the effort and benefit while go about a different task.

Asynchronous Efforts
A key decision was to focus user story around the 'couple' in two different locations at different points in the journey. This added complexity, but was what users voiced was most practical.

Outcomes

More to come shortly.

Beta group for testing new feature.
Product Releasing to App Store February 2022.