Adero

The world’s first intelligent organization system.

10 months from vision to launch

My Role

After an initial ideation phase, the team grew. I was the client point of contact, responsible for defining project scope, design resource planning, creative direction, and a fair bit of UX execution. Because Adero didn’t have an internal design team, my main stakeholders were the CEO and VP of Product. I partnered with a visual design lead to help develop the design language for the digital product and a project manager to help align schedules and deliverables across partner teams.

Collaboration

Because we were developing Adero in parallel to the existing TrackR products, the client relied on external partners to help realize the product in such a short time. As the first team to come aboard, I collaborated directly with teams across hardware, software, and brand to bring the Adero service to life.

From ‘Tap the app to find what’s lost’….

Visioning new products

In addition to company strategy, we worked to create tangible assets that would help the TrackR team envision their new product line. We thought holistically across industrial, interaction, and visual design to present several options to refine moving forward.

Foundational Research and Concept Evaluation

In parallel to the vision work, we partnered with the TrackR marketing team to understand user needs and market fit better by running foundational research initiatives. I created protocols and study materials for an ethnographic in-home study, focus groups, and concept evaluation interviews.

Defining a product roadmap

We synthesized our user research into a journey that followed a user’s path from constantly losing items to staying organized and secure. More importantly, we were able to map TrackR’s product roadmap along the same journey. We marked their transition from TrackR, a company that helps you find lost things, to Adero, a company that prevents loss by keeping you organized.

We were also realistic about our tight timeline. Using this framework as a guide helped us have hard conversations about what features and experiences to prioritize for our initial ‘minimum lovable product’ launch.

 …to preventing loss through organization.

After a lot of hard work iterating, defining, designing, and collaborating with partners, we created the Adero system, spanning web, hardware, software, and packaging touchpoints.

Smart Tags & Taglets make Containers.

Just place a Smart Tag on your bag and Taglets on the things that go inside. Think of Smart Tags as Mary Poppins and Taglets as the kids she’s managing: they’re in a relationship with each other, but your Smart Tag is the boss! The Adero system makes sure you never leave your items behind.

Your Smart Tag knows what’s in your bag.

Relax, it’s rechargeable.

Preventing loss with Taglets.

We created Taglets because of a key research insight: most of the time when people forget something, it’s usually not something important like their purse or keys. More often, it’s the smaller item that goes inside like your laptop charger or soccer cleats. Taglets were a smaller, cheaper, and less intrusive solution to that problem. And they’re waterproof with 2-year battery life, so you never have to worry about damage or charging.

The Adero app keeps it all together.

Ditch your phone, stay organized.

We also wanted the app to fade into the background. Once a user sets their preferences, they can rely on notifications and interactions on the Smart Tag to help shift to more organized behaviors.

The Smart Tags are capable of alerting the user if they’re separated from a Taglet and allows them to quickly check the status of their container.

A holistically considered out of box experience.

Let’s face it: a system that asks a user to activate, pair, and name up to 14 Bluetooth devices at one time could be a recipe for disaster. We carefully mapped out the user’s onboarding journey, defining UX from packaging layout to detailed app flows. We iteratively tested our solution in a series of usability studies using the RITE method to ensure the best possible experience.

Creating a design system.

With teams spread across California, Sweden, Ukraine, and China, we needed to have clear, detailed design specs for the teams to follow. I led the team by structuring, reviewing, and approving each spec with the Adero product team.

Interaction Design Documentation

I split app features into separate tracks of work and distributed them to each designer on the team. Every feature was given a page in a shared wiki site accessible by the product and engineering teams.

The wiki pages created a centralized source of truth for each detailed interaction spec.

A cohesive brand

It was essential to both the Adero team and us that the brand and product be completely unified. We worked closely with our friends at hello design to ensure that we shared a mutual look & feel across product and marketing touchpoints.

Visual Design Language System

As an extension of the brand collaboration, I led the visual design team in the creation of a product design language system. 

I ensured we shared each element of visual design with product and brand stakeholders for approval. All high fidelity app screens were placed in Zeplin to make implementation clear for developers.

Launch

Adero launched to the public in December 2018.

In the press