Mobilix

Mobilix is a desktop app with a standalone tablet app that is used by public transport management to deal with bus stops and their work orders. I was thrown into this huge project when I started my first full-time job as a UX/UI designer. I was tasked with developing user-friendly and attractive interfaces for the app's different parts, all while making sure the development team would be able to create the real product in code within our tight time frame.

The design process for Mobilix was far from the textbook process taught at design schools. This was a real-life project with very special requirements, restrictions, and needs.

The product was sold as an existing product, even if we had nothing more than experience of similar products to our name before. This limited us in how we could do proper user research and testing of the most basic features. The solution to this was to fall back to strong use of UX best practices, and excessive internal testing.

Selling a new product as an existing one also gave us a very tight deadline, where we had 4 months to do work that in normal circumstances would have ticked in closer to a year.

To be able to align design and development we had to prioritize the application to be designed almost frame by frame. The challenge lay in analyzing and translating the client's widespread requirements to tangible design tokens that would work together in a logical way for the users.

To be able to do this I sketched up low-fidelity prototypes on paper, using the crazy-8 method which is perfect for individual brainstorming, to be able to test my hypothesis. Once the low-fidelity prototypes worked, I created medium-fidelity prototypes in Figma that were later tested by the stakeholders within the company who had extensive experience within the field of public transpiration management.

After the medium prototypes started to be transformed into high-fidelity prototypes, I could start building on a component set to speed up the continued design process, as well as help the developers save time in creating their tokens. Even though all components were custom, it was based on Tailwind components.

During the whole development process, our internal developers and field experts continued testing the design which led to a few iterations along the way. I some occasions it was not until the different parts were finished and puzzled together that you could truly test the cross-functions, and therefore it was necessary to modify some flows and designs.

The feature that stood out most in this sense was our custom-built filter which was not the typical one-direction filter, but a filter where different filters played together to create different outcomes. In this case, I had to use a small external testing to come up with the best, and most user-friendly design.

While the focus of the project was the desktop application we also had to design and develop an accompanying tablet app for the workers who stayed out in the field, doing the actual work from the work orders created in our desktop application.

For this, the focus had to change. Even though we wanted to keep the aesthetics similar to the desktop version, the environment where the app would be used is much different, and the users will handle it under very different circumstances.

The whole package, desktop app, and tablet app, was released on time, keeping on the tight deadline. The client had a thorough education of the application's complex features and then they were ready to start using it. The outcome was very successful, with our final product meeting all the client’s criteria as well as excelling and delivering even better features and functionalities than what the client had asked and hoped for.