Share Orbit: Concept & Brand Design Development 

The Overall Problem

Share Orbit began from the simple idea that people didn’t have to purchase unique items if they needed to use them for a short period of time. Patterned on the approach of Airbnb, in which people can rent out the unused time with their possessions, Share Orbit was created with the goal of creating a marketplace in which those with excess things could be paired with those in need of borrowing those same things.

Share Orbit enlisted the help of GRAYBOX to help build a plan for their web application that would set enable them to pursue investment capital to bring their solution to market. Share Orbit was starting from a blank slate — the company did not yet have logos, identity, technology, or other plans. GRAYBOX took this green field approach, and worked with the client partner to craft a really elegant plan for their project.

Our Solution

1. Logo & Identity Design

In prep for launching their business. Share Orbit needed a number of pieces of collateral. Knowing the team was going to be presenting and pitching to investors, GRAYBOX planned a series of deliverables including business cards, presentation decks, and leave-behind folders for printed materials. As a foundation for creating these components, GRAYBOX started by creating a Logo for Share Orbit. Our design team started by working with the client partner team to understand their goals, from where they derived the name, and how they perceived the company. From there, GRAYBOX created a big list of low fidelity sketches to outline different concepts for the logo. After reviewing these concepts with Share Orbit, the list was narrowed to several candidates that were polished to a presentable digital format with several variations. A final version was selected from this list, and final iterations resulted in a great finished logo that accurately conveyed not just the brand name, but its purpose and intent. With this foundation in place, GRAYBOX tackled the exercise of incorporating the resulting logo and identity elements into the other collateral so that Share Orbit would make a great first impression with investors.

2. Persona Development and Journey Mapping

While people had become familiar with property and ride sharing applications, the concept of “anything is for rent” was a very sharp turn into the sharing economy philosophy. The big challenge was to ensure new and existing users could easily and intuitively use the web application in a way that was engaging and built long-term users and community. To facilitate our planning exercises, GRAYBOX developed four key user personas, and created a journey map for each through their core set of interactions. This exercise provided us with a compass — a reference point to which we could refer as we embarked on the design phase, to ensure we were accomplish the goals of each user type in a meaningful way at each step in the process. As an added benefit, this exercise lent additional weight to pitch materials, and became a portion of the marketing plans for how to bring the site to market at launch.

3. Clickable Prototype Creation

The culmination of the logo, identity, user persona, and journey mapping exercises was the creation of a clickable prototype Share Orbit could use to demonstrate their idea to potential investors. GRAYBOX started with a Sitemap exercise, defining the various content types at play in the site, the relationship of different paths and data to each other, and which aspects of the site would be available with and without being logged in. Using this baseline, GRAYBOX created a series of wireframes, utilizing the graybox methodology, highlighting the architecture of each of the page types. Onto this scaffolding GRAYBOX layered visual designs. These were full visual mockups of the pages, including sample images, text, identity colors, the logo created above, and all other elements that would give the appearance of a completed page. Finally, leveraging Invision, GRAYBOX mapped the key user interactions to clickable “hot spots” on the page, which allowed a user to navigate between the various pages as if they were interacting with an actual web application. This approach allowed the Share Orbit team to showcase not just how the site would look, but how a user would interact with the site, all without writing a single line of code.