Designing a bunch of interesting stuff at an events start up

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Before we get into the work I feel like I have to be completely honest about my time at Verve which is now Pollen (yes, THAT pollen).

After several months working there, I noticed a few incidents of racism. I reported these to both the Head of People and the CEO. Both of whom assured me that this would be investigated. This was the catalyst for the events to come, one of which was the company trying to illegally deport me during my visa process.

This company was led by a group of disgusting and horrible people and I’m glad that the world is now able to see them for who they truly are.

Despite all of the above, I got to meet a group of wonderful people that were in the product and tech teams and we worked on interesting stuff.

Moving into European markets

Verve’s product was made specifically for just the UK. One of my first projects after joining the company was to get the product ready for our European expansion, specifically Germany, France and the Netherlands. This revolved around two main areas: the sales flow and localisation of the entire product.

The sales flow needed to be rethought for two reasons. The first and most important one was that it needed to comply with strict anti-spam laws specifically in Germany and secondly, it was outdated for our target audience. The localisation was a critical piece of work that was needed for launch. Not just translation but address formats, currencies and payment methods.

The project spanned over 4 months and involved over 30 user interviews from multiple countries, 4 major iterations on the flow not including minor iterations across the flow, working with 3 different translation agencies to find the right one, a lot of usability tests and a few legal meetings to make sure we weren’t breaking strict anti-spam laws.

Creating new iconography

When the icons were initially designed for the product they were quick designs that were needed for the MVP. After assessing the product in my first week at Verve I wanted to design an icon set that was designed for the product, felt more cohesive and had guidelines for future icons. After pitching this to the head of design I was given the go ahead.

Making recruit pages more helpful

The clients recruit ambassadors using a recruit page for a specific festival/campaign. The old pages didn’t really explain much to potential ambassadors, they just gave a brief and vague overview of everything. Plus they only gave the client very little customisation for their brand.

After many user interviews with potential ambassadors from Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand we discovered the most critical things for potential ambassadors to learn before signing up were how it all works, what they can earn and what it was like to be an ambassador.

Work on this feature lasted 3 months (not including the build which was still in development when I left) 2 of which I was based in Australia and ran 20 user interviews with potential ambassadors.

Expanding the product

My last two projects at the company were group events and seated events. Both of these were a part of a company expansion into travel and sporting events.

We started by running 2 full day workshops. We spoke with several experts at Ticketek (who was our ticketing partner at the time) and ran several user interviews where we spoke to current ambassadors who had expressed some frustrations with trying to sell to groups for festivals.

After these sessions, I made several basic flows that illustrated the core differences between our existing product and how the new features would affect it. After that I made some very crude mock ups/prototypes and ran a few usability testing sessions with existing ambassadors.

A few weeks before I left the company, the final designs were ready and they were starting to pitch to several US based companies and sporting franchises.