Katch is a US-based early-stage startup with less than 20 employees. At the time I joined the company as the sole designer on the team, the product was in the private beta stage.

During my limited time at Katch, I achieved the following goals:

Testimonial

“Goksu demonstrated strong analytical skills and could easily grasp the whole user journey from the first day of his work, which really impressed me. Thanks to his user empathy skills he helped us redesign the navigation of the app and worked on a slack app which is still to be implemented. Goksu can challenge ideas that make him a great team member.”

Anna Blasiak

Head of Product, Katch

After a quick onboarding that brought me up to speed, getting me to know about the issues that the product was facing at the time, the Head of Product and I conducted several brainstorming sessions to decide on the best medium to test the product-market fit and primary / secondary features.

We concluded that a Slack app would be the ideal medium as it is easy to prototype, it is relatively quick to develop, and, most importantly, most of our target audience would use Slack as part of their professional life regularly.

Two forms of availability

Around the time we had just started working on this Slack app, we considered two different forms of availability that I called local availability and global availability.

Katch Slack prototype

The reason why we considered this concept of local availability was that in some very large companies, signaling that you are (globally) available to everyone on your Slack channel means that hundreds of people would be able to request meetings, making it extremely hard for the user to maintain.

For reasons that I was not informed of at the time, we were asked to quit working on the Slack app and move to work on the iOS app that the company was already developing at the time I joined.

Shortly after, the executive team set a date for a Product Hunt launch, per some changes in the company's short-term plan, and to make sure that we do not miss the deadline, we had to work in a very agile manner, redesigning primary features and preparing/explaining handoffs to engineers in an almost bi-daily manner to complete the Katch iOS app.

As my seniors were worried that the product was bloated with many features, the Head of Product and I were asked to work on and re-design some hand-picked features that were considered necessary for the optimal user experience. Those three key features were Availability Hours, Marking as Done, and Sending Meeting Requests.

In fact, I strongly considered going even further and adding a tab view as below. The purpose of this tab view would be (1) to improve this continuity even further, and (2) to obtain a higher level of design scalability. Yet, per the team's feedback, we gave up on this idea; though, I personally still think that it is an idea at least worth exploring.

Availability Hours

Availability Hours helps the user to get more timely reminder notifications from the Katch iOS app.

Thanks to a new user flow we came up with, our users no longer need to turn on/off this feature, enhancing the user experience immensely.

Marking as Done

To make sure that the user interface is not bloated with inactive meeting request cards, we enabled our users to mark them as done and remove them from their interfaces.

Send Meeting Request

More on this later...