Howl
Project
❷ – ⑥
° Info
I was as a Senior Product Designer at Howl — a startup, in the influencer e-commerce industry with a $1.2 trillion market opportunity, focused on building tools for creators and brands to sell more products across social platforms.
My role at Howl was very fluid (like most startups naturally are). I’ve lead design on Howl’s first design system during a rebranding and built foundational self-service tools for Creators and Brands including analytics, payments, and campaign management. All of these key initiatives were the catalyst for Howl’s new-and-improved product, howl.link, as well as extensions of the core product like Howl’s chrome extension and mobile app.
Timeframe
2023 - 2024
Responsibilities
Design Systems, UI/UX, Strategy, Art Direction
Platforms
Web, Mobile
A fresh slab of concrete
✺
In collaboration with the design studio concrete.ca, Howl was presented with new set of brand guidelines with a refreshed identity. It became evident that Howl would need to transform the core principles of the rebrand into a dynamic design system and cohesive product experience.
My role was to lead and build a design system centered around Howl’s rebrand. Ultimately, enabling our product and engineering teams to build products that infused the new brand ethos consistently and at scale.
° Team
Tricia Choi, Kyle Makischuk, Katyayani Singh, Jeremy Rieger, Nirmal Patel, Luke Heary, JR Razmus
Expressive by nature
Our new expressive typefaces were BallPill and Foundry Dit — two highly distinct typefaces that needed complimentary foundational elements and clear guidelines around product usage. We established a functional icon set that mirrored the style of our expressive typefaces.
This bespoke icon set allowed us to infuse our brand expression during large display moments all the way down to the tiniest 24 pixels.
The icons were flexible enough to stand-in as spot illustrations. A visual technique of repetition and layering was added to our illustrations during interactive moments to help highlight our brand's ethos of growth, progression and creativity.
Functional by design
The rest of the design system was intentionally kept functional by design to emphasize the expressive moments within Howl's product. Our core components often acted as an instrument to dial in the noise and strike a balance between fun, yet focused.
Many of the design system building blocks can be combined and customized to create new user interfaces quickly and efficiently for both high and low density formats. As a result of months of hard work and collaboration across design and engineering team we were able to translate a rebrand into a product interface that was infused with the principles of the Howl's brand language.
Endless applications at top-notch speed
Given all design systems are a constant work-in-progress, Howl’s system is no different. I continue to lead the team through iterative design cycles and stress testing across different mediums including product, mobile, email, and social.
Scaling the design system to the wider team gave more room for play and ways for the product and brand to connect. I established feedback loops through bi-weekly reviews and solidified decisions in documentation. The system allowed our team to design consistently, yet autonomously — exponentially increasing our speed of delivering Howl’s product beta.
Building toward beta
✺
Over the course of six months, we rebuilt Howl’s entire product from the ground up ushering an archaic tech stack into the modern era (read more about it here). I lead the design of several foundational product experiences including home page, analytics, payments, and campaigns for both Creators and Brands.
° Team
Li Haslett Chen, Al Lieb, Tricia Choi, Kyle Makischuk, Colby Gergen, Ozal Khan, Nirmal Patel, Luke Heary, Jonathan Maier, Bernardo Rubin, Marlon Vilorio, Jayden Rasmussen, Julien Delort
Our refreshed creator home focused on a new incentive model around personalized offers from brands. Offers provide creators with additional rewards when driving revenue for the brand.
Learn more while you Earn more
For analytics, I connected with our partnerships team to speak with creators and brands to learn about what data would be to their greatest benefit. During this discovery phase, we were able to design and build new analytics visualizations and category groupings for Creators earnings to show a performance breakdown by brand, category, and platform.
Leaning into transparency and a refreshed tech stack, we tied analytics with an Orders Feed that would give instant gratification when a creator earns commission on a checkout further deepening their motivation to earn.
Analytics
Creators can see their performance across all their organic activity.
Orders Feed
Creators receive a quick hit of dopamine for every earning.
Make money, do good
I worked to streamline payments for creators and brands by providing transparency into scheduled payments and granular, line-by-line breakdown of earnings/spend distribution.
This part of the project required frequent meetings with our new third-party payment provider, Modern Treasury, who helps manage Howl’s transactions and balances in a performant database. The design solution I provided needed to align with Modern Treasury’s API and data model.
Creator Payments
Drill into upcoming and past payments — getting as granular as the commissions paid order-by-order.
Brand Invoices
Understand how your spend is being distributed across partners and payment types (i.e. commission, flat fee).
Extending our impact
Our goal with the beta was to not only redefine our existing experience, but also design new surfaces in which we can meet our Creator’s needs on-the-go. I assisted in designing a chrome extension and mobile app which allowed Creators to easily generate shareable links with their audience.
Within the first two months of our beta launch we were able to activate brand-to-creator opportunities with Samsung and Nordstrom which helped acquire net-new creators, drive up link creation rates, and ultimately earn Howl revenue (over $350k so far and counting).
Mobile App
Launched in Aug 2024, the mobile app will allow Creators to easily create links on-the-go.
Chrome Extension
The chrome extension allows Creators to easily create monetizable links on the internet while browsing their favorite brands.
˚Projects ↓
LoomUnlocking the potential of video at work by empowering effective async communication through the lens of a purpose-driven and approachable design system.
HowlDesigning for a startup in an $1.2 trillion influencer e-commerce industry focused on building tools for creators and brands to sell products across social platforms.
SquareBuilding an ecosystem of integrated set of tools for all kinds of businesses and people through the power of Market Design System.
TwitchBuilding experiences where millions of people come together live every day to chat, interact, and make their own entertainment together.
NagarroThinking breakthroughs through innovation by helping companies build technology that revolutionizes how customers use their products.
IBMHelping API Developers build on more than just code by providing simplified methods and a built-in toolkit to build smarter solutions.
