Once I understood what their v.1.0 platform was capable of, I ran competitive analysis on several brands, including Applebee's, Home Depot, and Best Buy. This gave us insight on what they were doing better, plus ideas on how we could improve upon their respective approaches.

Armed with a deeper understanding of the landscape, I jammed with our Front End Developers and Chief Operating Officer to boil it all down to its minimal wireframe skeleton.

Seeing the core structure come into focus, I decided to break down their forms into steps, which favors lower cognitive load and less visual noise upon the user, thereby reducing their sense of working to complete it.

Once laid out, I then presented three possible lo-fo flows to our Chief Operations Officer to feedback upon. Naturally, his notes were encouraged, and it was awesome to see him write out "you're the man / thank you" at the end. You're the man too, Eric!

An iteration later, we nailed the MVP in the digital context as the prime use case. Then each other method, plastic and print, naturally branched from its roots. We eliminated a step and cleaned up a few things to forge our rock solid, fundamental flows.

Our core now in place, I proceeded with how the solution would look like, matching match our initial brand, Einstein Bagels. Applying this to other brands would simply be an asset and palette swap so we can spin up any brand, maximizing my team's efficiency.

I made the baseline flow following the MVP on the first pass. The UIUX was clear, yet the language was under debate from various perspectives. There were also many stakeholder questions regarding my mobile-first approach in general, since they’ve never seen a process like mine before. Plus, being our clients have a strong desktop userbase, they all had to see, discuss, believe, then proceed.

I picked the most involved screen in this flow from the desktop view. This helped in convincing stakeholders that each element was in place while facilitating comparison with the v.1.0 solution.

Furthering the Hi-fi polish forward, each screen, case, and state were designed and accounted for.

To show the level of scrutiny each element underwent, here’s one example. Being this was to be structurally repeated for myriad brands, every detail had to be thought out, justified, tested against, requirement checked, and having achieved consensus with high quality.

As our client list expanded, their custom solutions would then increase the amount of feature sets the v.2.0 platform would support. These were variable and my task was to repeat my methodology, design the solutions, then hold design documentation as The Source of Truth for our entire company to have a shared language and vision. Taking my Design First approach, another benefit was that clients were invited to give early feedback while managing or exceeding expectations.

Client requests, business rules, and platform requirements were the anvil upon which new abilities were forged. At this point, the massive benefits of my "Lead With Vision From The Front" style was clear, and so no code was written until my "Source of Truth" was created and approved.

Making an "Atlas" of the product screens proved to be valuable for engineering, development, management, business, marketing, and operations since we all could easily take a zoomed out lens, point, and communicate clearly.

With clients such as Einstein Bagels, Panera Bread, National Amusements, and Overstock served, my status advanced rapidly. Entrusted to design their entire software suite, from Digital Wallet to Marketplace, I took this opportunity to evolve our components, extending Material Design principles, and grow our platform from v.2.0 to v.3.x. Accomplishing this would put us steps beyond our lead in the competitive landscape.

As new features came in with corresponding email triggers, defining screens along the user journey was natural. To ensure we got it right, I designed various paths and layouts so we'd hit consensus.

Once our user journey was optimal, I then created several viable layout options.