As a start-up co-founder and product designer I gained experience prioritizing tasks, designing data driven products, and presenting to investors, clients, and other business stakeholders.

Duration: 2021–Present

My Role

As CTO I lead the team’s product, development, and design efforts. I executed and oversaw every aspect of the product life-cycle: prioritizing new features, designing the mobile app & website, collaborating with developers, and analyzing the market to improve and plan for the future.

Project Goals

Our first objective was to design a mobile app and website that consolidated hunting laws and regulations from various states. By providing a centralized platform, hunters can easily access and view important regulations, eliminating the need to search across multiple government websites. The goal is to enhance the hunting experience by saving time and ensuring compliance with the necessary legal requirements.

Our second objective was to establish partnerships with state agencies and offer them a streamlined platform for creating and tracking hunting regulations. By bridging the gap between hunters and state authorities, our solution aimed to promote greater compliance with laws and reduce barriers to entry in hunting activities.

Introduction

In the United States, each individual state is responsible for creating its own hunting laws and regulations. This has led to some challenges for hunters:

Season dates and rules vary from state to state.
Each state publishes regulations differently including the use of PDF's, physical booklets, websites, apps, or some combinations of these.
Hunters need to know multiple sets of rules and understand which jurisdictions supersede which: federal, state, county, etc.

Most hunters grow up hunting, learning from parents and grandparents. But there is a high barrier of entry for new hunters, something that the state governments would like to address.

Design Challenge: Hunting Seasons

Across the country, Wildlife biologists establish hunting seasons for every species & sub-species of hunt-able game by looking at historical data like number of hunters, hunter success rates, and the population trends of native species.

But it can take a long time to find all of this information...

And this is just the page for Deer in Alabama. Many hunters also need to view season dates for a particular piece of public land they're hunting as well.

We made a few pieces of critical information accessible directly from our home page.

Open our app or website

Home: See what animals are in season

Game Page: See specific season dates and names

Location Filter: See season dates and names for a particular piece of land

Design Challenge: Home Page

We sought out to redesign our home page from its initial release to better serve our users. We wanted to increase accessibility to state pages, a way for states to highlight news and other regulatory updates, and make it easier for hunters to access land pages for areas they are near.

An image of a Macbook and an iPhone with new designs of the Regline home screen. The tabs on the top of the laptop extend beyond the outside of the laptop showing the tabs that are normally hidden.

Challenge 1: Increase accessibility to state pages.

Users were mainly using our initial home page to access the state page they were hunting in (which was most commonly their current location). This meant scrolling through an alphabetized list in which hunters of states like South Carolina, Texas, & Virginia were forced to scroll the longest.

Since the state pages were already the most commonly visited pages, we turned our home page into these state pages and separated each page with tabs that could easily be scrolled through. Additionally, hunters would open the app to the state they were currently located in.

A close-up of a computer and an iPhone that are mostly blurred except for one clear element that shows "News & Information" for a state's hunting page.

Challenge 2: Add a way for states to highlight news and other regulatory updates.

Our initial designs had no way for state agencies to communicate important information such as species quotas being met and ending seasons early, new annual regulations being released, and area closures occurring. Although it’s ultimately the responsibility of each hunter to search out this information and know the laws, we felt we could bridge the gap in communication much more effectively.

To solve this dilemma, we added a section at the top of each state page that served to directly communicate items like season changes, regulation updates, and emergency closures. The redesigned home page would give this even more discoverability since it was visible from the moment a hunter opened their app. But adding the ability to send out information like this as a notification will help that even further.

Low fidelity app design wireframes in grayscale on the left and complete app designs on the right on an iPhone screen.

Challenge 3: Decrease the time it takes to access land pages for areas hunters are near.

One of the most urgent needs for many hunters is the ability to check information about a piece of land they are currently hunting on. To surface this information to ‘active hunters’ as quickly as possible we added a button in the top corner that opened a menu showing nearby public hunting land.

Many low fidelity app design wireframes in grayscale.

Two app screens, one of an old home page, and another of a redesigned home page.

Final Results

Our final solution to the problem was a relatively simple one: use our most visited page as our home page. Placing these pages in front of the user immediately upon opening our app meant that users could access all of the information nested below quickly, but also accomplished our goal of presenting other information, like accessing nearby land, at the forefront of the app.

App Flow

A flowchart of the Regline app user flow.

App Features

Two app designs of a hunting regulation displayed on an app sit on the left side on a green background. The right side shows boxes with state codes listing 25 states, a notification alert from an iPhone about hunting seasons, and a wiry design of an app with more regulations.

Organized Regulations

We improved these regulations by tagging each item to relevant species, categories, lands, and more so that each piece of data could be easily found depending on the user's search context. Instead of relying on internet searches which often had trouble bringing up relevant results from PDF's, users can use a search feature within our app to find a regulation from any state.

Hunting Seasons

We gave users a way to quickly identify which animals are in/out of season and get the necessary information about details such as authorized weapons, bag limits, and more.

Two app designs of a hunting license displayed on an app sit on the left side on a brown background. The right side shows a wiry design of an iPhone with hunting licenses and hunting license packages highlighted in the foreground.

Outdoor Licenses

Users can view a list of the outdoor licenses for hunting, fishing, trapping, and more offered by each state.

Land Pages

Many of our users know exactly where they’re going to hunt when they come to our app. It was important to create a page that served as a hub with all of the most important high-level information about a piece of land or a state...

“What animals you can hunt and when?”
“Are there relevant regulations I should know when hunting on a particular piece of land?”
“What licenses are important or needed to access and hunt on a piece of land?”
“Who manages the land and how do I contact the authorities with questions or concerns?”

The Brand

Picture Sam Elliot telling stories around a campfire.

Image is split in 3 sections. The right has hand-drawn illustrations of animals with their species name below, such as a rabbit with "cottontail Rabbit" written below. App design elements fill the center column and crop off the edge. A photograph of ducks swimming in a pond is on the write, with an overlay that makes the photograph have a wavy money texture in blue and white.

Our brand took a lot of inspiration from the concept of an explorer's field guide as they journey across "new" lands. Rough sketches of animals, a warm collection of grays that harken back to sepia tones of the past. But our brand also needed to embody trustworthiness and maturity, which we embody through type that's informative and trustworthy, like notes from a science textbook.

An app screen with a duck, the word "Waterfowl" and other hunting related imagery fills most of the page with lightly drawn animals framing the background.

A photograph of two swimming duck in a pond with reeds poking out from below the surface of the water.

An image with many colorful boxes displaying a color palette for the app. One of the boxes has the words "Untitled Sans" & "Untitled Serif" written multiple times in different thicknesses.

Challenges

Mastering an Unknown Field

I had never hunted or (considered hunting) in my life before taking on this project. Information architecture was a pivotal focal point for this project since the core of the business centered around communicating and organizing data and information more clearly.

Thus, it was important to spend ample time researching the structure of hunting in the U.S. by interviewing hunters, game wardens, & state agencies.

Learning about a new topic from novice to expert is undoubtedly one of my favorite parts of the UX process. I’m extremely passionate about the intake and segmentation of information and plan to continue learning and developing this skillset as I approach new projects.

Start-up Budgets

Duh.

Start-ups don’t have a lot of money and that severely limited team growth, research opportunities, and more.

That meant things like doing a bit of guerilla research with friends, family, and an expanding network of people rather than writing formal tests, like I had been so kindly used to at a large, well-funded corporation.

Making Big Decisions

Coming straight from a “individual contributor” role at a big corporation, I pivoted into a very different role within my new company.

I was not only responsible for the day-to-day tasks of designing the flows, prototypes, & interfaces for a new app; but also for establishing a direction for the product, coordinating with our development team, and decide how we would get our app to the stores at all.

It’s safe to say mistakes were made, but I learned a lot while in the hot seat making decisions like cutting features to hit deadlines.