Gustavo is a web platform that makes life easier for professionals and food enthusiasts. It removes the pain of finding food-related information on the web by grouping and synthesising them in a single place.
My Role
I collaborated with two developers, a strategist and a salesperson. Potential investors were involved in the process. I designed the product and its user interface.
Scrolling Gustavo Home Page
Project Execution
To design the Gustavo platform, we iterated through the three phases of Think, Make and Check. We made use of the following toolkit:
Think
Workshops
Competitive Analysis
Business Model Canvas
SWOT Analysis
Personas
Make
Paper Sketches
Prototype
UI Design
Check
Pitch to stakeholders
User Interviews
User Testing
Interviews
A presentation video illustrating the platform’s functionalities
We used the Mockup as a Minimum Viable Product and tested it out among potential users and investors.
We found out that, while the User Interface was appealing and easily learnable, the idea was too wide and dispersive, making hard for people to find it valuable
Conclusions
One of the biggest finding was that’s better to focus on a niche than trying to reach a broad audience. That’s because you try to satisfy too many requirements, often getting in each other’s way, and you end up with something that fails to meet any needs. It is essential to set priorities.
The abundance of features came from the fact that we introduced them just because we thought they could have been useful, we didn’t focus on solving a problem or meeting users’ needs.
Current State: After the testing the product on users, we realised there were some problems in the initial ideation. The project is currently considered failed, waiting for a deep redesign.
Instead of just modifying the product making the same mistakes, we decided to start our restoration process from a higher lever, rethinking the methodology and involving users and stakeholders more than we were doing.
The next step will be to narrow down the scope of the product, focusing on a single area (eg. TripAdvisor for Food Deli) and a smaller niche (foodies and Deli owners).