Smerle

The challenge

Smerle is a commuter transportation startup in the Bay Area. The founder approached me with the challenge of designing the whole package: everything from branding to product design. I was thrilled about the opportunity and became the second team member to join.

Team

Designer (me), founder, 1 front-end developer, 2 back-end developers, 1 android developer, and 1 iOS developer

Scope

Branding, iconography, IA, screen flows, web design, product design, ensuring correct design implementation

Tools

Pen and paper, Sketch, Illustrator, Photoshop, Zeplin

Identity design

Smerle is a kind of delivery pigeon known for its speed and the ability to find its home from anywhere. Since the company was going in a few different strategic directions, the logo needed to convey the sense of possibility. The logo combines an outline of a bird with an infinity mark in one continuous line. When following the outline, you inevitably come back to the same place you started, which mimics the nature of going between work and home. The light green color speaks to the ease of using the service, and alludes to the stop lights turning green and making your commute faster. I also used a rounded and informal typeface for the name.

Product design

I usually start with sketching out my ideas because it allows me to explore possibilities quickly and evaluate them with stakeholders and users. Here, I also started with sketching and making paper prototypes to get all the layouts and flows to a solid place to create the initial registration process. I then jumped into Sketch to put together digital wireframes so that I could create a prototype for the team to get feedback on.

I made a number of tweaks to the wireframes based on the team’s feedback and moved on to the visual design. We started with the Android app and I stuck pretty close to Google’s Material Design guidelines.

Here are a couple of the menu screens. For the FAQ section I went with a scrollable tab bar to display the different categories of the questions.

For the payment change confirmation, I am going with the Material Design’s guidelines and using a snackbar.

One of Smerle’s advantages is efficiency in bundling people living near each other together and picking them up. Some of the efficiency depends on the passengers being at their pickup locations on time. To help with this, users get a push notification when their ride is 10 and 5 minutes away. Once their ride is there, the passenger is given 30 seconds to get in. To notify them we are using an alarm-type countdown.

The first screen you see after registering is the time selector. Once the time is chosen, you see the location of the driver on the map as well as some information about the van and the driver.

The second iteration of the time selector.

The result

Thanks to the team’s dedication and collaboration, Smerle is rapidly expanding in the Bay Area’s B2B commuter transportation market and is currently in the process of adding a carpooling service.

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