Caitlin Sowers
Product designer
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EDVO

Launch an MVP to build knowledge directly in your web browser.

Problem

The internet helps us learn anything, but was built to fetch and display information, not help us process what we consume.

How might we offer in browser tools to help make sense of complex information, form takeaways, and store it in meaningful ways?

Research

On discovery calls with motivated self learners like investors, independent writers, and startup founders I heard about pains in their workflow.

  • "I want to spend more time learning and less time organizing"
  • "I struggle to access information exactly when I need it"
  • "My notes are spread across multiple apps, they're hard to revisit"
  • "It's hard to know how my knowledge on a topic is building over time"

MVP

Outcome

Our initial product launch was strong which validated our problem space.

ORGANIC SIGNUPS

1600

Waitlist conversions

20%

signup referrals

20%

account creations

25%

Quickly we learned our solution needed iterations to increase usage of the product. I advocated to make less assumptions and talk to more users to improve the the product's utility.

Improvements

I tested multiple iterations to simplify tools when consuming content and in the web app. A dropped in approach ultimately allowed a user to choose how deeply they want to dive in.

Components

Retro

Edvo was my first experience as a solo designer building an end to end product. I'm proud of our team's grit to continuously iterate the product. I worked closely with our PM to speak to our beta users often, form insights, create hypotheses, and prototype solutions.

Looking back, the MVP's scope was too large and relied on too many unproven assumptions. Validating hypotheses and talking to beta users more often would have de-risked the product.

In terms of the product's success metrics, quality of learning proved difficult to measure. I began to develop an insight to instead measure speed to a deep focus state. I ran user testing to validate this which was promising which would have been valuable to explore further.

Team

Caitlin Sowers (Product Design)
Shireen Jaffer (CEO)
Darlene Dang (PM)
Abdul-Rasheed Bustamam (Dev)
Daniel Norman (CTO)