Fuigo
Brining project management tools to interior designers
Fuigo provides business tools and in-person community to help their members be more successful.
Interior designers are running into disconnects by using several different programs to conduct their business. Having different programs to keep track of causes them to feel scattered and less prepared.
Fuigo developed a web application that streamlined the budgeting, quoting, and purchasing workflow for interior designers. As a result, interior designers could spend more time on design while feeling confident about executing proper business practices. The platform was used by over 200+ designers across 30 design agencies.
As head of product design at Fuigo, I coordinated all aspects of the research/design process. I conducted ongoing user research sessions, wireframed new workflows, prototyped and tested with interior designers, and coded our designs alongside the engineering team.
The founders of Fuigo have an incredible amount of industry knowledge having been vendors to interior designers for over 30 years. Since Fuigo was also a co-working space for interior designers we had a pool of designers to interview and test our assumptions with. Over the course of development we interviewed designers weekly to make sure we were building the tools that solved their main business problems.
Our team worked using a lean approach to product development. Design worked about 2-3 weeks ahead of engineering. Each feature was prototyped, tested, iterated on and then built into the production application. As a designer who enjoys to code, I built a live styleguide to help bridge the gap between design and engineering. As the project progressed I also took on much of the styling of the app.
Interior designers run very complicated small businesses. Many designers spend 70-80% of their time on administration/accounting related tasks. Our goal was to create a platform that would speed up the detailed purchasing related tasks and give designers more time to design. The Fuigo project management platform successfully allows designers to quickly input items, create detailed and well designed client documentation, and view an overview of the progress and health of each one of their projects.
As we dug deeper into what tools would be most useful to professional interior designers we came upon an opportunity to better connect designers to vendors. In addition to project management tools, we built a digital library for designers to research, browse, and buy products directly from high-end vendors. This tool allowed designers to pull product directly from the library into their projects with a single action, streamlining the entire purchasing process.
