***THIS CASE STUDY IS STILL IN PROGRESS
Caitlyn thanks you for your patience and encourages you to enjoy my bite sized case study on my work for Expresso, a coffee chatting platform for UC Davis students.
EXPRSESO * 2025
Pre-professional content exploration for students @UC Davis
ROLE
Product Designer
TIMELINE
November 2025-January 2026
TEAM
Product designers,
SWE Product management
OVERVIEW
Context: Expresso
Expresso is a coffee chatting platform for UC Davis students, connecting upperclassmen mentors to underclassmen seeking pre-professional advice.
At the time, our product aimed to serve one key functionality—onboarding mentors and students and displaying mentor cards. While our minimum viable product had no trouble with first time user acquisition, our retention rate was lackluster.
My role: the content exploration feature
My solution to our problem was finding a way to offer more personal and well rounded insights from our mentors in the hopes of our mentors being able to leave a stronger impression on our users, leading to higher chats booked conversion.
The Team
Design iterations
Different iterations of the feature throughout multiple rounds of user testing, surveys, alignment syncs with product management, alignment syncs with the SWE’s: the works.
REFLECTION
Learning how to function cross-functionally
The biggest lesson I learned from designing for Expresso was how to operate in a cross functional workflow across product management, development, occasionally supporting our product marketing manager and graphic designer. The timeline of this feature particularly suffered from my initial lack of sufficiently thorough communication with my research and feature direction, which has taught me the importance of ensuring alignment across domains in a product environment.
STAY TUNED
Stay tuned to hear about...
- More of what I gained from working closely with our devs in our quality assurance procedures
- The user experience consequence of large image uploads—how we should reconcile the delay of image loading on our home page
- Learnings in cross functional research flows between me and product management
- How to collaborate on research, where to take ownership over the process
- The responsibilities that come with end to end ownership
- More on my takeaways with owning a feature in a team with devs and PM’s