Outdoor Buddies will set the standard for a new European outdoor industry where circular and sustainable outdoor activities are the norm. My role was to design a new backend system enabling their circular workflow.

BACKGROUND

As a pioneer in the rental industry for outdoor gear, Outdoor Buddies provide a sustainable service for skiing, hiking, and other outdoor activities, to avoid and reduce mass production of clothes and gear that is used once or only a few times a year.

OPPORTUNITY

Outdoor Buddies have kept growing to become one of the most attractive outdoor rental services in Sweden. They need to automise workflows to lower the risk of human errors, be more time-efficient and enable onboarding to be able to grow as a service. No other booking system provide the complex functionality they need and with financial support from Energimyndigheten they initiated a project to fill that gap.

SOLUTION

Create an MVP of the extended part of the booking system, called Octopoda. Design, test and implement a service that is automatic, user friendly, intuitive, communicative and time-effective. Analyse and use the results and finished design to find partners to proceed the full development process to reach business goals.

This initial part of the process would include flows for the new parts of booking system and implemented in an MVP.

MY ROLE

UX/UI DESIGN, PITCH DECK

I conducted research on the client's business goals and user studies on brands, partners, product owners, stakeholders and non-users. Based on my findings, me and the team developed, implemented, tested and defined the needs and goals in their service, always ensuring the client's "why" was fully met along the way.

USER STUDIES, PROTOTYPING

I designed user flows, wireframes and intuitive functionality for the extended part of the rental service that fulfil the client needs and makes their offer unique on the market. I provided results from the user studies, and designed the unique part of the booking service for implementation.

PITCH DECK

I also gave the client's pitch deck a face lift including Octopoda for their future investment opportunities.

RESULT

The analysis and data from this phase provide information about the product development, time management, and resources needed for the following phases of the product development process.

The implemented MVP was delivered right before the summer of 2023 according to the plan and requirements from the investors.

Working in this project until early summer this year and right before the client's high season, it is still too early to get insights of the results and usage of the tool.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS

PRODUCT COMPLEXITY & CLIENT SATISFACTION

Tight budgets and small teams working on complex systems is always a challenge, especially when the system looks simple. Communicating the needs to define a different process after a research phase led in this case to a big change in the initial goal, but the transparency leads to lower development costs and reduced future headaches when potential problems can be avoided in an early stage.

REMOTE/FLEXIBLE TEAM CONSTELLATION

Every individual in the development team was working flexible hours remotely (but from the same village) and were all used to do so, which made the onboarding process easy and motivating. Being a team of people who have the same routines and way of working was a great match for all of us, and we quickly found a common social environment both digitally and physically that kept us strong and happy throughout the whole process.

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