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GasBuddy hired me to help with their design refresh project — most particularly, to help them with information architecture and interaction to accommodate their new subscription model and multi-account approach, and to tighten up their presentation.
GasBuddy had a number of problems to solve, driven by their primary goal of changing their subscription model from a model of one subscription for any given fuel station to a model of organizational subscriptions containing one to many sub accounts containing one to many fuel stations and one to many users permissioned across stations or sub accounts. This project required the redesign of their invitation, registration and authentication workflow; information architecture; navigation and wayfinding devices; organization-, account- and user-level profiles and permissioning; and organizational, account-level and station dashboards.
GasBuddy did not have a designer on staff in 2018, and recognized their need to implement their platform changes in a way that would be easily understood, useful and usable for their users.
I was hired on a 3-month contract to serve as their designer and work in close partnership with their Sr Product Manager and Lead Engineer to help define design needs for information architecture, navigation and wayfinding, workflow, interaction and presentation for several key sections of their B2B platform.
They had performed all discovery work on their own and did not desire any up-front research from me beyond what they provided. In addition, I would not stay through their development process and they did not desire that I engage in any validation activities.
GasBuddy had already performed research and had decided on a fairly well-defined direction. I was given a wide variety of discovery materials and was invited to Boston to spend a week sitting with my partner team in brainstorming sessions, conducting stakeholders interviews, and consuming various materials and conversations to learn the business and project goals. I performed a preliminary heuristic evaluation of the existing application, and based on all existing inputs we worked together to determine rough workflows and to understand what the precise design needs were and prioritize/order those needs.
Immediately below are sample images of some of the initial workflow analysis:
We moved to sketch work to represent users and goals, scenarios, task flows, and page designs for discussion. Selected sketch samples are shown immediately below:
Sketch work lead to negotiated agreements and final designs were created to represent those agreements across desktop and mobile breakpoints. GasBuddy determined they wanted the flexibility to use the design work as guidance to their development efforts — they did not want a formal specification and work was delivered as Sketch files only.
My contract was complete before this work went into development, and the product manager with whom I worked is no longer with GasBuddy — I don’t know to what extent this design work was implemented, nor to what degree it has been successful for them.
