Launch date: December, 2022

Live at: https://www.letscolife.com/

Role: Lead Designer and Developer

‍

‍

CONTEXT

While at Platform, I almost exclusively work to build new companies to life. CoLife was an opportunity to jump into an existing company and implement a new feature. CoLife offers affordable co-living options young renters. The founder wanted a prototype to test the concept of a general maps page to support their matching algorithm. I took their existing build and integrated an Airbnb-inspired browse feature in a separately hosted web-app.

‍

Before fully designing the interface, I needed to make sure I could access the data from the existing product.

‍

‍

‍

CHALLENGES

This project had a very quick 2-week turnaround; the founder, Derek, wanted to validate this concept as quickly as possible. I decided to do all of the designing and prototyping in Bubble to save time and resources. This was more efficient but ultimately at the expense of strong user research and testing. However, since we were utilizing the Bubble prototype for the live app, we could iterate very quickly and test different properties, preferences and styles.

‍

‍

‍

‍

Integrating a separate web-application into CoLife's product wasn't as simple as rerouting a URL and matching subdomains. I had to match the design language of the company with my tool so that the experience was as seamless for users as possible.

‍

‍

On the one hand, utilizing an existing design system was helpful, but it was hard not to feel limited with the existing design constraints.

‍

‍

Since we were using a live prototype to validate this concept, we had the freedom to mix and match different search parameters to see how users behave.

‍

LEARNINGS

CoLife Browse was a great early project that taught me how to collaborate with an existing companies resources, codebase and design system. While building a company 0 to 1 has its fair share of value, adapting to an existing team's workflows provides its own unique learning curve. This tool was ultimately replaced by a new, refined browse page one the company was funded, but it was nice to see my prototype being used as long as they did.

‍

‍