What was the scope of their involvement?
I can’t give too much detail on the project itself, but it was a consumer-facing app for one of our brands, and it would allow users to access their accounts, their loyalty points, and also to shop from the app.
Before GobySavvy came on board with this specific project, I had created all of the wireframes in Axure, and they turned those wireframes into a clickable prototype. I worked with Ryan directly. He came into the office. We had a lot of phone calls. But it was really beneficial to have someone local who could come in and meet with me and go through feedback and brainstorm different ways to approach the problem within the app or to solve a usability issue. It was so long ago, it’s hard to say the timing, but I would say we probably worked with him for a couple of months. But it was such a pleasure working with him because my team is just me and my manager, who’s the ED of UX. I didn’t really have a team of designers to work with, so it was great to have someone who knew Axure, was very skilled in that, but then also knows UX and was able to contribute different problem-solving ideas.
Because I felt like he was so successful in that project, I told my colleagues and they brought him into other projects. Ryan went on to work with other colleagues of mine on more web-based apps. One project is live now, and it’s a digital flower bouquet builder for Mother’s Day. You can send it to your mom with a personalized note. It had really beautiful animations. He basically had a designer that created the UX for it and the prototype. I wasn’t involved in that project, so Ryan was the lead UX designer.
And then some other things that we’ve worked on? We built an appointment-booking app, starting with loose wireframes, not totally developed, just high-level, low-fidelity. One of his designers and I worked very closely together. That designer also had a lot of UX background, but also experience in Axure, and it was really important that we built the prototype because we wanted to make sure we could test it fully.
There was another project, but I can’t remember what it was. But it was also UX related. All their projects involved Ryan or his team creating wireframes, a prototype, and even helping with user testing. For one of the projects, he helped me set up the test questions and go through the feedback and figure out what we should change. They were involved in different stages for various projects.
How did you come to work with GobySavvy?
At the time, Ryan, the founder, had just started the company. I was one of his first clients. I found him as an independent designer on one of these websites, Freelance.com or something like that. We hired him thinking he was just one guy, but then I found out that he had his own company. I guess it was fate.
How much have you invested with GobySavvy?
I don’t really know how much the other projects were, but I would say no more than $20,000.
What is the status of this engagement?
The summer of 2015, maybe May, is when we first started working with them. I don’t know about my colleagues, but I think they use him once in a while. I don’t really work with him anymore because we’ve hired more internal people to take the workload. But I also believe that his focus as a company has shifted from what it originally was. Originally, his focus was creating projects and doing usability studies, and now I believe he’s more focused on e-commerce and providing long-term solutions. We’d still bring him on if we needed an extra set of hands, but in the beginning, it was the perfect time for us to have an external partner. Now that we have more internal people, we don’t really need the extra help right now. I guess we stopped around November 2016.
Revenue and email lists expanded, and increased automation delivered greater value than expected. GobySavvy communicated consistently and made themselves available to answer questions. Their knowledge of e-commerce is especially noteworthy.