Kitchn.io’s high complexity no-code platform
When a former colleague and two of his friends formed Kitchn.io, a company that innovates on performance marketing automation, they wanted me to step in right away to develop their future products, as they knew the complexity that would come upon them.
The second iteration of their performance marketing automation platform, is a high-complexity automation builder, that allows performance marketers to execute their workflows with a scale and speed that otherwise would not be possible. The challenge lies in designing a system for visual representation of API functionality, combined with the possibility of automation and cross-platform integration.
From the start, the founders had this vision of this big drag-and-drop interface where multiple services could integrate and pass data around that would accelerate creation, optimization and reporting, tasks that are usually made manually and take lots of time.
The result is still a living thing, and coming closer to an open beta, which due to its complexity will still take about one quarter of a year to open up to the public, and still has many open ends to improve both on the UX and in the general approach. However, the first customers onboarded have quickly been able to set up automations and modify their behaviour, and slowly and intuitively build custom software that gives them an incredible competitive advantage.
Keeping complexity simple
While most of the first setup happens on the canvas, where the user is able to drag and drop to create connections, most of the configuration happens within the sockets through panels which hold custom components that allow user-friendly inputs that generate objects accepted by the APIs.
Scaling a living platform
Being a highly technical solution, we were prototyping and iterating very fast. Many solutions that would come from a backend-only approach would have to find a frontend representation and intuitive flows of usage. My advanced knowledge of software development allowed the product to move forward at high speed, pushing for consistency and good UX while trying to keep up with the incredibly fast-paced development environment this company handles.
Here are examples of some operations happening within the platform that require different user flows overlapping with each other
Designing the service
Once the paradigm of how the interface would work was on the right path, an even bigger challenge begun: to onboard customers into the service and get them to convert as users.
There was a lot of behind-the-scenes thinking on the right model to use, and the team spent a few days figuring out the best user journey to achieve conversions.
The result is still a living thing, and coming closer to an open beta, which due to its complexity will still take about one quarter of a year to open up to the public, and still has many open ends to improve both on the UX and in the general approach. However, the first customers onboarded have quickly been able to set up automations and modify their behaviour, and slowly and intuitively build custom software that gives them an incredible competitive advantage.
Project Highlight
I love a highly-technical project, because the impact on the user is so strong and easy to measure. We iterated fast (and failed fast!) but ultimately came up with something that both a non-technical marketer and a highly technical developer can use with ease