In Brazil, a consortium is a purchasing pool through which a group of people pay monthly instalments on a certain item so that every month the group can afford to buy one of the items, which is then awarded to one of the group members in a draw. There is no interest, just a fee charged by the the pool administrator. Unfortunately, many people can’t afford to finish paying those instalments, but the good news is that they can sell it to Consorciei and avoid getting into debt.
I was called by Consorciei to build their website’s layout and UI Kit from a pre-existing wireframe and logo. The idea was to make the company look more modern and technological, but at the same time conveying reliability and simplicity. Blue and yellow were the colours they felt comfortable using.
During the process, I asked them to use real testimonials from actual clients and reduce the size of the texts, presenting them in bullet points and boxes to increase readability. I opted for illustrating them with icons due to the lack of images or illustrations available and, due to the short deadline, we agreed to use a component library as a basis to speed up the development process.
It was a great first experience working for a startup as a freelancer, especially one that was worried about design consistency: thanks to the new design, conversion has already grown. One thing I'd do differently, though, would be trying to negotiate some time to work on icons and illustrations to obtain a more more friendly and refined look to the website.
In the second project, we developed a platform to sell those consortiums in a fast and simple way. For this project they already had a pre-existing demo, but I suggested we started by quickly building some priority guides, which was essential to redefine the content of each page, its hierarchy and user flows - including emails - in more details.
After that, I transformed the content in a wireframe based on the demo and all the alterations that came up during the previous phase. Once approved, I made a high fidelity prototype with a visual identity that referred to their website.
I was pleased with the visual aspects of the platform and it was an awesome challenge to build it as a freelancer. Something I'd do differently would be to insist, especially during the research process, that we focused even more on usability.
