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When I joined Carrot they were just a team of seven people with a small CO sensor and a big idea. As the first and initially only designer, I owned all design projects and was a lead on the Pivot mobile application from its inception. I continued on as a Lead Product Designer for almost four and a half years and provided mobile design leadership as well as hands-on production support as the company grew to 50 and beyond.
Working directly with the leadership team, I was involved in all aspects of the Pivot product design. I provided guidance and mentorship to fellow designers, organized and engaged in company design jams, participated in user interview and feedback sessions, and worked closely with clinicians, management, and engineering to ensure clear direction and quality of execution.
As a hands-on designer at Carrot I took design concepts and turned them into wireframes, user flows, and high fidelity screens. I also generated art and animation assets and established our design delivery pipeline.
As the company grew, it became apparent that we needed to establish guidelines and a set of agreed upon tools in order to best track and execute designs.
I established a workflow and delivery pipeline using Sketch, Zeplin, and Jira. In order to maintain consistency and speed up design, I also established a UI Toolkit with a Sketch shared library. This enabled designers to create screens with approved assets and UI controls quickly and easily.
As the design and engineering teams grew even larger we realized we needed more detailed tracking of tasks and deliveries. We moved the design team into scrums with engineering and, on my suggestion, began tracking our design tasks with Jira tickets alongside engineering. This made it much easier for engineers to find the design files and for project managers to see exactly how much each designer had on their plate.
Pivot is a multifaceted smoking cessation program that involves breath sampling with an FDA approved breath sensor, personalized coaching, guided lessons, building a quit plan, skill building, and community support. The program is based on methods that have been proven in clinical trials to be effective.
Addiction is a difficult thing to overcome and smoking cessation programs have a fairly low success rate. Our design challenge was to take the most effective elements of clinical, in-person programs and translate them into a more accessible, affordable, experience.
Engagement and guidance were identified as critical to user success. Without an engaging product, participants wouldn't remain in the program long enough to reap the benefits. Without enough guidance, participants wouldn't know how to make use of all the features in Pivot.
My design incorporated these key elements. Each day 'My Daily Pivot' suggests actions for the user. These suggestions are determined by where the user is in the program and what their goals are. Because there are new suggestions each day, this feature created a more interesting and engaging app-experience, even after many return visits.
The dashboard was one of the first features I designed for Pivot and it is still a key feature in the app today.
The dashboard is where a participant can review their breath sensor data as well as track cigarettes they've logged. The goal of this screen is to encourage healthy behavior change by personalizing sensor data. We discovered that simply being aware of ones exposure was a great motivator to reduce smoking.
To help users get the most value out of their CO sensor I designed several guided sensor activities. In this example, a participant samples before and after smoking a cigarette to see how even one cigarette impacts their CO level.
Nearly 2/3 of participants in our largest clinical study said they weren't ready to quit. Typical quit programs miss those people entirely. In Pivot, they have a 31% quit rate. Even in a study where 2/3 of participants said they were not ready to quit, Pivot delivered a 32% quit rate.
At Pivot the brand and product design teams would often work together. This afforded me the opportunity to create art and animation assets for use in-app as well as for use in branding and marketing collateral such as websites, emails, and posters.
