tessa
🏗️ From MVP to BETA launch
The opportunity
Modulous' flagship app 'tessa' is a generative design tool for modular construction. When I joined in January 2023, tessa was a 1-screen MVP built in 12 weeks by engineers. In 10 months we used quick design sprints to iterate the product and zero in on what mattered. With no active users, this meant a combination of user testing and workshops with SMEs. Along the way these sprints helped craft the vision, product positioning and value proposition.
My role
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Design lead
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Project management
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Research planning & execution
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UI design
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Support implementation
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QA
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January 2023 - basic MVP and a rough value proposition.
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Needs to grow into a BETA product by September 2023.
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Senior stakeholders with different visions.
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No users.
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Need to sell licenses!
Carousel: Screens from the MVP - Designed by the devs
💡 Stakeholder Workshop
Soon after joining Modulous, I hosted a workshop to find out what the senior leadership felt tessa actually was, and create a list of questions that needed answering. Some of these pertained to the product itself, some to the value, some about the users' workflows.
Miro board from stakeholder workshop
👨🔬 User Tests
We quickly tested with 5 users, and collected a wide range of feedback. We synthesised this data and extracted some key findings around functionality, usability, and value.
Carousel: The findings
🎨 Redesign
After prioritising a list of optimisations and new features, I delivered a holistic redesign of the platform with a lot of help from the devs, stakeholders, SMEs. and our junior designer.
To respond to the findings we made some changes:
A clearer, cleaner first time user experience.
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A clearer, cleaner first time user experience.
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An improved layout for "Canvas" and panels.
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Replaced manual saving with autosave and undo/redo.
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Introduced sorting, pinning, moving, and customising content in the table of generated design options.
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Computational experimentation to optimise the generated results.
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Export feature.
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A slicker, more consistent UI stemming from our bespoke design system.
Carousel: Key screens from the redesign
🚀 October 2023 Launch
This is the product we launched in October 2023. As you can see, there are a few changes we didn't get to make, but the result was well received and our first batch of free-trial users began logging in daily to use the tool in their projects.
🎓 Learnings
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Have a vision, but hold it lightly.
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Establish a working group early on for complex problems.
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Experimentation strategy is key for AI generative models.
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Prioritise ruthlessly.
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If no user base, learn from SMEs, competitors and test wherever you can.