Smerle

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.

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 second iteration of the time selector.