Beesly

UX & UI, Branding
Beesly started as a hackathon project, eventually turning into our first product. It aims to help small business owners manage their day-to-day.
The Challenge
Small business owners are often challenged with keeping track of their stock and knowing when to reorder, especially while living their busy lives.
The outcome
Beesly looks to improve this flow by increasing transparency through contextual updates, prompts, and a live digital helper.
Clade attended Hatch This!, a local Asheville organization that hosts a pitch competition, where individuals have the opportunity to stand up in front of a crowd and present their product idea along with a plan for how it would conceivably grow and ultimately be financially successful.

KISS (Keep It Simple Studid) Consulting - pitched by Drew Crawford - aimed to provide real-time updates to small business owners on their stock, when they needed to order more product, and help give them more time back for the things that matter in life outside of work. Drew's pitch was accepted, awarding him the opportunity to gather a team of attendees to help execute on this idea. Given how well-organized his business plan was and how much passion was behind his drive to help people we opted to join his group.
The Clade team was responsible for all the information architecture, visual designs, illustrations, branding, and animations, while Drew took charge of the overall business logic.

After only a few days we were able to discover the beginnings of a brand voice, come up with an early business strategy, and begin some rough user stories.
The Application
As part of the application we needed to design a marketing page for users to schedule consultations and learn more about the product.
By designating various roles to one another and closely collaborating together we were able to enhance Drew's initial idea and take it to places previously unimagined.

The branding and logomark developed quickly after we decided to explore the use of voice recognition. With how personal a phone is to so many people, especially business owners who tend to have their device on them at all times, we decided we should embrace the hands-off ability for someone to ask business specific questions from their device.
The Email
As part of the application we needed to design a marketing page for users to schedule consultations and learn more about the product.
By the end of the weekend we were able to get some early stage wireframes together and begin user testing, which gave us the chance to validate many of our assumptions.

At the end of the pitch weekend each team had to present their experience, findings, and ultimately the direction of where they’d like to take their company. Based on this presentation a panel of judges then selected a winning team.

Thanks to a great slide deck, beautiful design, and a well-structured narrative presentation we were able to come out on top and leave with funding to see the product through!
The Website
As part of the application we needed to design a marketing page for users to schedule consultations and learn more about the product.
Once Hatch This! was over, we began working remotely, but never lost sight of the product we were looking to develop. We had regularly scheduled daily stand ups where everyone could provide their updates. Tasks were assigned to various team members and kept a Jira board to ensure they got done in a timely fashion. It was important to establish this practice early on so that we never lost steam prior to the initial MVP release date.
The Website
As part of the application we needed to design a marketing page for users to schedule consultations and learn more about the product.
During this time Clade became the product's source of truth. As we added new features, discovered new requirements, gathered more user feedback, and created new flows we would document anything and everything into a styleguide for the print and development teams to access.

This documentation assured brand unification throughout and made sure a user had a great experience no matter where or when they used Beesly.
Styleguide
As part of our design engagement we put together a styleguide of all brand assets, showing Beesly how to use the logomark, when and where to use certain typography, and what colors are appropriate to use.
At the end of the project we stepped away feeling secure in the team’s direction. We were able to build their user experience from a concept, test it out with real users, design an MVP for mobile, web and email, and establish a brand that could live well beyond our involvement.

We are very happy with what we were able to produce and hope that as a result small business owners are having a better daily experience by spending more time at home with loved ones rather than staying at work.

Some of our other work