As the lead product designer at Ninety, I often spearhead net new, green field product initiatives – getting stakeholder buy-in, coordinating product and engineering resources and ensuring our POC aligns with user needs and business objectives. In the case of Ninety Go, I led the company’s first foray into a dedicated mobile PWA.

The Ninety experience had always been a desktop-first one. While the app was desktop responsive, the experience was so broad and feature-rich that it was becoming continuously less feasible to maintain in a mobile form factor without losing navigability and usability. Customers were clamoring for Ninety on mobile, and the opportunity was ripe – 23% of our user base were using the app on their mobile browser, despite us not having a dedicated app.

I saw an opportunity to craft a radically reductive mobile experience that better aligned to the habits and behaviors of our ICP. If done right, we could significantly boost DAU and DSDAU. In addition, the mobile form factor could serve as a proving ground to test a number of workflow improvements.

A culture of continuous discovery and numerous customer touchpoints meant we already had a wealth of insights into the behaviors, needs and pain points of our mobile user base. These were on-the-go, visionary small business leaders and entrepreneurs, brimming with ideas and spontaneous thought. They were rarely in a flow state, and wanted a frictionless way to view, update and add tasks and discussion items ahead of their weekly team meetings.

The team believed we could significantly boost engagement from our DAU by slashing our feature set, drastically simplifying workflows and refactoring the mobile navigation around jobs to be done (JTBD).

‭The user would land on feed showing the their most relevant, time-sensitive tasks to kickstart async engagement, with a simple four-layer navigation built around common JTBD. Artifact creation was performed via a frictionless, forgiving flow that eliminated required fields and allowed users to save in an intermediate draft state, radically shortening time to artifact (“TTA”). Users were also able to create and move between teams inside their company with jut a few taps.

The POC of the app was built on the Ionic framework, giving engineers easy access to native patterns for both Android and iOS. To assist engineering in bridging the gap between visionary design, I built a mobile design system consisting of core patterns and Ionic components reskinned to resemble the Ninety look-and-feel. From there, the process was one of continuous iteration with myself serving as the converging point between visionary design, product requirements, business timelines, framework limitations and engineering capacity.

The Ninety mobile experience (dubbed “Ninety Go”) wil be a pivotal part of Ninety’s quest to build a comprehensive business operating system – an opportunity increase asynchronous engagement, shape habit loops, expand beyond ICP and reposition Ninety as first to mind in our users’ workdays.