Zyper is a multi platform community influencer portal, allowing brands to create small communities of influencers and incentivise that audience with rewards for posting on their social media channels. Amber Atherton, the Founder of Zyper reached out to me to create the first initial design and prototype of the Zyper iOS App. The project started with just an idea and was worked into a fully working prototype that was put infront of investors and developers. (It even travelled to YCombinator). I worked closely with Amber to bring her vision to life in a prototype version.
We first started with an initial in-person meeting, discussing the requirements and limitations of the project with Amber and her team. After hearing Amber's idea and goals for the project, we worked to refine the idea from a design perspective into a clear critical user path for the prototype. As affordability was key due to the idea being in an early startup phase, we didn't conduct user testing and went straight to wireframe utilising common usability best practices. We started with initial sketches and worked upwards to a fully working wireframe of the application, conducting the "mum & dad" test to confirm the usability of the product.
The overall visual design needed to be exciting and targeted to a younger audience, with a down to earth tone and branding, but continue to be user friendly and accessible, the complexity arose with users joining multiple communities and being granted various ranks within those communities.
We worked through numerous versions of the design until we ended up with the version that detailed the critical user path and hit all the key elements of the brief that we wanted to bring to the application - exciting, accessible and user friendly. Keeping users informed was the key challenge of the application as user's wouldn't be instantly accepted to communities, in app rich-notifications and push notifications where used to keep the feeling the app was alive and exciting.
The prototype was finished with interactive prototype that allowed for investors and first users to experience the application and feedback to Amber and myself clearly. The early feedback from initial users of the prototype was positive with written feedback reinforcing our goals of excitement throughout.
After the design hand-over to the team, Amber & the Zyper team went out to seek investment using the design as a key part of the selling pitch. I'm happy to say that the app received investment and went on to be part of the YCombinator group of startups. The app's screenshots were featured in the likes of Business Insider and Forbes.
Once Zyper officially launched in the App Store, they started onboarding lots of new users and brands, with the feedback reviews on the app store and from brands themselves around the experience being positive.
Zyper reached all new heights with user numbers and the company was eventually acquired by Discord. With the design and critical user path staying the same throughout their companies life, it holds testament to the design process that was worked through with the team and myself.