Gatherly is a video conferencing startup that was founded during the 2019 COVID pandemic. With Gatherly, online events are provided a spatial online venue kind of like a video game. Participants can click on a mini-map and "walk" up to whichever conversation they like.
I joined as one of the first 10 employees and was their sole designer for almost a year. I watched the company go from hosting a few events a week to hundreds of events a month, earning more than 1 million in revenue. Working at Gatherly was my first taste of working as a UI/UX designer, so there was a lot to learn and many hats for me to wear.
My biggest challenge starting this UI/UX job was, well, that I didn't know much about UI/UX. The team initially only asked me to help out for a few weeks and give them some tips on how they could improve their designs. They hired me because they thought the slide decks I made for the interview looked pretty. However, we ended up collaborating for almost a year and I fulfilled a full-time design role because they saw the benefit of a dedicated designer. I was able to take on many roles from UI/UX designer to website creator and manager to marketing specialist.
My time at Gatherly was an invaluable experience that helped me grow into the designer I am today. This process involved both a lot of applied skills from my Industrial Design background and a lot of learned skills on the job.
The design process I used varied from feature to feature and changed based multiple factors as I weighed the value add versus the investment required:
The process itself involved the following steps:
Here's a taste of some of the features I designed:
I did two design iterations for elevators while I was there. Each Gatherly event could have different floors with different layouts, and the elevators feature was how attendees could move from one floor to another. The use of floors was a key way of scaling, branding, and monetizing the platform, so I had to consider opportunities in terms of UX and sales as I designed.
The original elevators were described as “overwhelming” and “confusing”. The maps didn’t show much information and showing all the users moving slowed the entire site by a lot. Knowing this, I was looking at solving three main problems with the first iteration:
I made 20+ different mockups for various elevator designs, some of which are highlighted below.
As a team, we decided on #5 because it emphasized the right information like floor name and function. We were able to keep some of the map preview functionality too. By having users click a button to preview the map, we could give them that information without straining the latency by loading all the maps at once.
The second iteration came with the necessity of updating the elevators along with a platform update. This time I focused on:
An idea that the team was immediately draw to was a sidebar elevator. Since it doesn’t take over the entire screen, it’s less startling for the user. I looked at multiple designs and layouts for this concept:
We decided on a simplified version of #4 for multiple UX- and technology-based reasons:
Along with the elevators, I also created some base maps for hosts to use in their events. This helped not only in alleviating the workload of hosts, but also gave them examples for kind of maps they could make that would work well on the platform.
Since spatial video chat was a new and unique method of interacting online, we found that people needed a little more help and guidance to be able to use the platform successfully. This was especially true for some of our users who were less tech-savvy. The onboarding therefore needed to:
We needed to find a way to teach people 4 main functions of the platform:
I researched best practices of onboarding tutorials and found that it was most important to keep them short, skippable, and minimize text that needs to be read. This is why we designed a tutorial where the attendees can learn by doing. I looked into 4 different methods of displaying the key steps of onboarding:
Option #4 was best in terms of visibility. After implementing that version and getting feedback from users, we realized that people didn’t know it was an interactive tutorial and got stuck because they thought they were in the event. Because of this, we added a bright “This is a tutorial” bar at the top with an option to skip to the event at any time.
A major project I undertook was helping with multiple platform redesigns as seen above. The final redesign was the most drastic and had three main goals:
For many months, attendees had been leaving feedback about wanting more space for people's videos. As a team, we also wanted to brainstorm how to better accommodate smaller screen sizes and think eventually about mobile and tablet compatibility. One of the engineers had a great idea of using a collapsable sidebar, and together we mocked it up and prototyped the feature. I helped by making mockups to figure out more quickly what the optimal layout could be.
We decided on layout #4, but realized two issues that needed to be solved:
Before, we used the sidebar to display notifications, so we needed a way to display them when the sidebar is collapsed. The final solution included varying button designs and a modification to how the collapsed map is displayed.
Accessibility was also top of mind since we were redoing the look of the whole platform. We talked with a lot of low-vision users to figure out what would help make Gatherly more accessible to them. They brought up a few key points that we worked into the design:
The platform could already zoom up to 175% without issues so I focused more on dark and high-contrast mode designs. To make the designs, I researched best practices for creating a dark and high-contrast mode for a website. I made sure the final designs were WCAG 2.0 compliant and approved by our users. This involved picking a set of colors to mirror the look and feel of the lightmode version of the platform.
The final design was implemented and pushed out to all the events. We continued to conduct interviews and monitor the feedback form to look for areas of continued improvement.
I feel honored to have watched Gatherly grow from a college student’s idea about more immersive online events to an innovative company that has been featured in articles from Forbes and CNBC and served clients like General Electric and Figma. It was thrilling to know my designs were being used by thousands of people each week for them to attend online events like no other.
I was able to learn plenty about UI and UX and how a designer would fit into and contribute to a company that was growing rapidly in a very competitive market. During my time there, we were able to hit 1 million in revenue only a year after the company was founded and host 5000+ events for hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world.
After working at Gatherly for 11 months, I learned a lot about what it took to be a UX designer. It was my first work experience in the field and helped me realize my passion for increasing the intuitiveness of interactions between people and technology. I was able to apply design thinking, visual design, and user-centered research methods from my major, but also had to teach myself a lot including about how to use Figma, communicate with developers, apply UI patterns, and promote accessibility standards.
This opportunity set me on a career path I’m passionate about and also opened my eyes to how much more there was for me to learn. I was grateful for the opportunities and connections Gatherly afforded me, and I hope to apply the rigor and passion I felt at Gatherly to any new roles I may fill.
