the Yerli
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Background
What is the Yerli?
The Yerli is an app built by college students to highlight and promote local businesses.
What was my role?
I joined the Yerli as UX Design Lead, where I conducted multiple design sprints to completely redesign the
- mobile app
- web app
- website
- overall brand
Context
The Yerli's audience and value proposition
The Yerli as an app connects
- small businesses who want traffic
- locals who want to engage with local businesses
To bring these two segments together, the app focused on two distinct features
- A directory of small businesses to help locals find these local small businesses
- A social feed to get the community conversing and learning about the local small businesses
Great idea, but there were a few roadblocks
Great idea WITHOUT great design
The Yerli was completely built by college students, so naturally resources and experience are limited. This lead to a poorly designed app based on many assumptions, and thus the need for a designer to help clean up the UI and UX of the app.
That's where I came in!
How might we redesign the app and website, and improve the overall UX of the platform
Research
Quick user feedback
I conducted a quick survey to establish the sentiments of existing Yerli users, and to identify potential areas of improvement for the app. Responses ranged from feature Requests to general feedback
Competitive Analysis
To gather some design inspiration and understand existing patterns in both the social media and the food space, I looked at various social media, food review, and community based apps. Below is a high-level look at some of the resources collected (primarily from uxarchive)
Design Audit
In addition to hearing from users and looking at other apps, I took an in depth look at the existing design of the Yerli's mobile and web app, which served as starting points for the redesign.
Design
Mobile app redesign + new features
I redesigned the mobile app screen by screen in Figma, in addition to creating new views for onboarding, and a whole new feature for projects. Below are some of the key screens
Web app redesign
To match with the new mobile app UI, I refreshed the Yerli's web app as well with new design system and more usable interface. See this in action at theyerli.com/explore
Marketing site
In addition to the mobile and web app redesigns, I also redesigned and rebuilt the Yerli's marketing website. Check out some key screens below or the full site at theyerli.com
Development
Implementation
I worked closely with the development teams at the Yerli to ensure the mobile and web apps could be implemented easily. I also built the marketing site myself in Webflow.