Glue is a platform and ecosystem that enables smart, controlled in-home access for people, products and services. Glue offers a plug-and-play solution for retail, logistics and home services providers to solve last-mile delivery, which is the biggest e-commerce pain point for consumers and retailers alike. This means groceries in your fridge, your online shopping in your hallway, your new bookshelf delivered and mounted on your wall and allowing access to cleaners, plumbers and nannies while you are away. At scale, Glue households will form a consumer network and the app will become a critical sales and marketing channel for Glue Trusted Partners, who can then better understand consumption patterns to sell more effectively with a higher level of service. Consumers will be able to govern their homes securely and remotely, selecting and rating product & service providers.

In my role as a Product Design Lead, I was responsible for all ux and design outcomes, including a new design system, the iOS, Android, and web experience. I also hired and managed a small team of 3 extremely talented designers and guided them along while Glue lost investment and almost closed down to being bought up.  This was my most challenging professional experience so far and mostly defined how I manage people and keep them motivated while still being hands-on myself.

To start with I gathered everyone together to discover our problem space with input from customer service feeding in our most frequent feature requests as well the most common problems our ca. 10.000 users in Sweden had with Glue.

Our biggest aim at that time was to reduce churn at all costs due to the business situation Glue found itself in. Based on customer feedback we managed to map a simple user journey to understand which feature requests we should tackle first.

I mapped out the end-to-end journey, including documentation of the actual physical lock installation and an inventory of all existing app flows for ios and android. I reviewed the app and created an audit to evaluate potential flows and aspects of the interface which might show aspects of the app that contained room for an improvement so that we could increase in-household usage.
We believed that increasing in-household usage would reduce churn.

Competitor research and inspiration

I picked one of our competitors who offered concierge type of display for the door status – visually not very appealing but it sparked a lot of creativity and ideas.

After a few crazy 8 sessions, I worked out an idea a bit further that our tech lead believed had the potential to meet our requirements of making key sharing easier by allowing us to modify guest access windows based on recurring time slots.

Wireframes illustrating auto unlock

The idea of auto unlocking a door with your phone, for example when coming home from shopping, triggered by a smartwatch, a users phone, or even other Bluetooth devices were a common feature request by our users.

Quick scribble which I created on my iPad to visualise a concept.

Wireframes illustrating a journey for the auto-unlock feature

UI explorations

Cover of Glue’s component library which fed into Glue’s design system. I picked up some work from a previous designer,  restructured it myself and then onboarded Lawrence who joined from marketing to oversee visual consistency while I focussed on the end-to-end experience and product improvements.

Re-designing Glue was a true team effort. As a Design Lead it was my job to get the whole team together and work collaboratively on the experience, facilitate workshops and produce measurable outputs in-line with our Objectives & KPI’s. As mentioned earlier, I cannot provide in-depth insights into this project at this stage and not show everything online. I hope I am providing a sufficient sneak peek of my work to give you an idea of my experience as a Design Lead at Glue.

Wireframes exploring the concierge approach

Wireframes exploring the concierge approach

UI for a beta test

The final result was a minor upgrade – I pulled the key sharing feature out if the navigation in a more prominent way to test if this would increase key sharing at all.

I paired this with a restructured left-hand menu

Some moderated and guerilla remote guerilla interviews as well as some some simple maze.com click-tests gave me a first idea of this project being worth pursuing.

We decided with our tech leads to build a few small iterative updates which then improved our in-household usage by 10 % within a controlled beta testing group. This approach gave me the motivation to bring our ideas and the -redesign to the next level.

The final result is a service-oriented display that shows the right information at the right time.