Helping users organize, socialize, compare, and discover products.

Pretzel was an early stage startup that sought to help people in their shopping journey. We built an experience that allowed people to gather all of their purchases or favorite products in one place. They could create collections, organize them, and share them with friends. I was the primary designer for all designs at Pretzel.

My Role

Lead product designer

Company

Pretzel

Year

2022

My Responsibilities

• Design
• Strategy
• Research
• Investor decks
• Wireframing
• Prototyping
• Handoff & QA

People have an abundance of stuff, but don’t know what brings them the most function, happiness, and fulfillment.

When people do find a product that adds value to their lives, it’s difficult to remember, repurchase, or share.

Problem

We started in the personal finance space as a visual receipt aggregator and finance tracking app. In order to help people understand their relationship to money, we wanted to present a list of all the purchases they made in the most visually appealing way possible.

Starting in personal finance

After feedback from investors, user interviews, and users testing, we quickly pivoted our focus to social shopping. We realized we needed to have a strong value prop and a clear problem to solve. When we ran into people on the street, we needed a clear concise reason for people to use Pretzel.

Quickly realizing we were in the wrong space and pivoting to social shopping

Features that solve problems

After shifting our focus, we aimed to help people in their shopping journey. What size of shoes does your son wear now? What was that exact color of mascara you bought last time? What were all of those items that your uncle used for the perfect brisket? Which of those four vacuums should you buy? We wanted to bring solutions to the struggles of remembering, sharing, comparing and discovering items.

Collections allowed users group all of their items into one place so they could reference later. Think Pinterest for the things you own. This made it really easy to keep track of all of the items you love and want to remember later.

Create collections

This feature allowed users to add a product from any website to a collection. They could do this via the share sheet, hyper link, or manual photo upload. We built an MVP version that allowed users to easily create a collection so they could compare different items they were thinking about purchasing. It was similar to a wedding registry without the wedding.

Save to Pretzel

After we launched collections, we started hearing feedback that users were utilizing collections to group things they frequently reordered. This led us to create a way for users to reorder items from within the Pretzel. We launched the feature with limited support and only offered Amazon to start.

Reorder items

We started to think about ways to engage our audience and give them a reason to regularly come into the app. This led us to introduce return reminders. This feature sent users a weekly push of items with a return window that was soon to close. The fact that we weren't selling physical products allowed us to put the customer first and ensure that they didn't leave money on the table. This proved to be a strong value prop for us.

Return reminders

An opportunity for users to save money

The addition of return reminders gave users the ability to miss fewer return windows, thus more money in their pockets.

An easy way to compare items

Pretzel provided an easy way for people to collect, compare, and contrast items which they were considering buying. No more endlessly bookmarking items.

A unified solution for reoccurring purchases

Reorder tools provided a solution to the hassle of reordering items across multiple sites.

Be ok with failing, learning, and pivoting

Getting the product in front of users early and often let us try things, fail, and quickly improve the product. Without this mindset we probably wouldn't have pivoted directions.

Unintended user behavior can lead to some of the greatest ideas

We noticed people using collections in ways we never thought considered. This led to the reorder feature .