Gitar
Led the end to end design on gitar’s transformative developer tooling solution aimed at fixing tech debt , reducing development time and delivering high quality code.
Gitar.co
MY ROLE
Research, conceptualisation, design, user testing and dev-handoff of designs
TEAM
Founders, Product Designer (Me), Design Manager, 2 Engineers.
TIMELINE
3 Months
INTRODUCTION
In february 2024, the founders of gitar contracted the entire design of their product vision to the design agency i was freelancing with. We took gitar’s vision from 0-1 and i led the end to end design process of gitar’s application UI interface.
WHO IS GITAR?
Gitar is a developer tooling startup building the modern software development platform. Gitar provides a complete solution for developers to fix tech debt and deliver high quality code.
PROBLEM & OPPORTUNITY BREAKDOWN
Gitar identified a need in the developer space for a solution that helps developers deal with tech debt, unclean code and stale flags.
71%
developers confirmed that they’re always looking for tools to improve their software development experience.
62%
enterprise solutions loose revenue daily due to time spent troubleshooting bad code.
UNDERSTANDING FOUNDER VISION
I ran a stakeholder kickoff session with the founders of gitar to understand their product vision, company mission, opportunities they saw and why they believe this is a needed solution in the developer community.
UNDERSTANDING THE USER AND THEIR NEEDS
I carried out various research practices and sessions to gather more insights into the validity of this solution and the exact needs of the users. This was important to ensure a viable solution that met user expectations and actualised business needs was delivered.
Qualitative survey results with participants between the age of 18 to 42 revealing common frustrations with stale flags, unclean codes, slow PRs and a generally cumbersome development process. All participants were excited about the possibility of having a solution that takes care of this for them.
In-depth remote setting interviews with great storytelling from developers helped uncover more insights to questions and assumptions made about certain developer experiences.
PROBLEM SYNTHESIS
After carrying out various research sessions and gathering a lot of insight both from developers, managers and the founders, I broke down the problems to solve for and needs to meet into the following.
Reduce time waste
Developers spend time which should be used in development to identify stale flags, clean code, scan PRs on github which isn’t directly related to their deliverables.
Automation
Developers have to manually scan and identify stale flags, unclean code and create PRs for them.
Integration & Support
Developers need seamless integrations to relevant tools and applications that generally enable them to deliver high quality code faster.
USER FLOWS
After carrying out my research and aligning with all stakeholders on this project, I had a strong direction of how i wanted my first solution to come to life and so i mapped out a simple user flow.
IDEATION
After completing the user flow, I brainstormed various solutions on paper and eventually came up with a set of wireframes that helped craft my final design decisions.
BRANDING
We worked on brand and style directions to establish a unique experience for gitar users. I collaborated with the brand designer to achieve these.
Source Code Pro
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HIGH FIDELITY DESIGNS
Website Splash Page
Exploration 1
Exploration 2
Exploration 3
User Interface Designs
Exploration 1 - Showing some early design flows and directions.
Exploration 2
RETROSPECTIVE
After finalising and delivering the MVP solution it was important to reflect and identify key learnings on this project and insights to hold dear.
Define the goal
I worked very closely with the founders to understand their vision and properly define it. This helped give a very clear perspective of what needed to be done. I was able to take the vision from 0-1 and deliver in time.
Iterate, Iterate, Iterate!
Iteration is the sauce of design!. I made sure to vastly explore and present all my design ideas so as to let the team know what was possible and land on an optimal solution.
Collaborate
I collaborated closely with the founders, product manager and developers. This was very important to ensure we were aligned on our goals and direction for the MVP. As well as to ensure the developers could build what i was envisioning accurately and in time.