Cubo

Notables

Key Functions

• Design of brand identity, packaging, mobile app, and marketing collaterals

• Scale with the team from 5 to 40+ remotely

• Drive and lead development of Cubo Design System

• Cross-team collaboration

• Strategically plan with and advise for C-level execs

We started with "who are we"?

Before Cubo became Cubo I worked closely with the founders to research the industry, major competitor products, and discussed Cubo's values and mission. Building a brand from the ground up is a long process and we're determined to help make Cubo the category king of baby monitors.

1st and foremost the brand name must be meaningful, easy to pronounce, friendly, and memorable — because parents we interviewed said so, not us. Collaborating closely with the Cubo marketing team we truly focused on 'customers first' and listening to their voices.

• 13 brands researched

• 16 apps (400+ screens) reviewed

• 20+ videos recorded

• 40+ names considered

• 50+ logo designs

• 10 rounds of iteration & user survey

• A lot of broken cameras & monitors

Style guides, mood boards, iconography, animations, and copy (wording) are all ways to convey the intentions of a brand. We make sure it's a living and evolving guide that can shift and mature with the team as the Cubo Camera is brought to life.

The hard part lies in how the team perceives the brand, and how do we relay this emotion and perception to the customers as well. Careful use of color and animations is one key way to achieve this.

Designing beyond just 'monitoring'

During development the team came up with the idea of not just monitoring for safety, but also helping to create lasting moments for the parents as well. By enhancing the A.I. built into Cubo cam, it will also learn to capture loving moments and events that the parents may have missed such as the baby babbling, playing, and smiling.

At first we had concerns that the baby photos captured would look too similar (since babies in cribs don't move much) and not interest the parents. However, after interviewing with a number of parents, we found the love for their little ones to be insatiable so any photo is a darling photo to the parents. This eventually became the Cubo Moments feed that our home test parents loved and were delighted by.

Early collection of cards that could show up in Cubo Moments based on content.

With a product as powerful as Cubo, a key challenge was to offer a rich experience with the wide range of features, but also to not distract & take away from the core monitoring experience. 1 thing that was invaluable to the entire product design process was the Facebook group of Cubo-supporting parents that the marketing team had created. We were able to get immediate and honest feedbacks from parents whenever necessary and it really streamlined the feedback loop we needed.

With the powerful feedback loop via the Facebook group and our own networks, we were able to strike a balance with the design in being extremely friendly to novice users, being educational and introducing what Cubo has to offer, while still keeping it flexible enough for power users' needs. Being so integrated with the team throughout I was also able to tweak and suggest new features where necessary, touching every aspect of the product down to the support tools.

• 1st time setup design

• On-boarding tutorials & tips

• Create Cubo Design System

• Prioritizing features and design according to business needs

• Feature, animations, & design specs

• Prototype

• Content, copy writing, translation

• Usability testing and research

• Feedback from 150+ home tests & 8000+ surveys

• Define metrics to track

The Cubo team helped ran home tests with 150+ parents to validate our assumptions, designs, and revisions.

The online presence

After 7 months of intense product development and testing it was time to prepare for launch on ZecZec, one of the biggest crowdfunding platforms in Taiwan.

Cubo worked with a crowdfunding specialist agency to help create the campaign landing page. The product website and the style guide I designed made the collaboration between multiple parties across different time zones less challenging than it would have been. Together we delivered an extremely successful crowd-funded campaign over 30 days. And the team did it again on Indiegogo a month later.

• Over 1000% of the original crowd-funding goal (twice)

• Highest-funded baby monitor

Launching a v1 is challenging, but improving and moving beyond v1 is a different set of challenges to over come — which is only possible with evidence and data. Together with the product team, we tracked daily usage metrics, sifted through countless feedback and surveys to understand our users and what they truly need VS want. Our assumptions were then validated with more user interviews and testing to differentiate between correlation and causation.

At the time of writing we’re wrapping up an early alpha version of the Cubo Design Library that will help the designs be more consistent, efficient, and scalable across marketing and the product (app). I’m also working with the team on a redesign of the home-screen. Early feedbacks show overwhelming 80% in-favor of the new design for users new and current. The new design focuses on:

• More quick access features at user’s finger tips

• Scalable design system for future growth of the Cubo app

• Better and more streamlined monitoring experience

Working closely with marketing, I also lead the redesign of the Cubo website for the new Cubo Ai Plus launch in August 2020. The new design proved to be a winner as we saw:

• Session duration up across all regions. More than 2x in the U.S.

• Sign up conversation to chatbot increased 3x in U.S.

• Bounce rate decreased by 8%

Rarely do you get to be part of a new exciting product since Day 1 without being the founder, but I’ve lucky enough to be part of this since the day the idea was conceived. It's been phenomenal working along side the world-class team to hatch the idea and grow and improve all the way through product launch.

When we design an experience, we look beyond just the mobile app. All touch points with the users such as Facebook ads, checkout process, packaging, and support are all part of the experience we care deeply about.  Now that the bird has left the nest, we congratulate Cubo on the successful launch and even greater success in the future.