For what services did your company hire Versions?

We hired Versions to create all of our interfaces from scratch, including the desktop version of the website, its tablet and mobile versions, and branding.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted to check our hypotheses by creating an MVP version of the platform, then find investments, make adjustments, and continue the development.

How did you select Versions?

It was our second attempt to hire someone good enough to implement our idea; the company hired before failed after almost a year of work. I searched through the internet ratings of design studios and also used my personal connections.

After the initial estimates, I interviewed seven different companies and freelancers.

Versions were recommended to me by another member of our team who had worked with them. It was a tough choice considering their high price and our low budget, but they just stood out from all other candidates, and we started the work almost the next day after the interview.

Describe the project in detail.

Our project's heart is a publication page with a video lecture section, a lecture notes section, an inline discussions interface, a community corrections interface, and in-publication navigation. Since this is the most difficult part of the project, which was failed by the company hired previously, we started from this point.

After a series of intensive discussions and ten days of work, we received the first concept from Versions, and already two weeks after that, the concept was finalized and sent to the development team.

This was an insane success, which helped us boost the development in the most suitable moment. After that, we continued on other parts of the platform, such as the search page, publication submission page, user account, course page, and landing page.

My role was to coordinate different team parts, write task specifications, and control their progress. We discussed every valuable detail of the prototypes with Versions throughout the time we worked together, and their contribution to the platform's final look is undeniable.

What was the team composition?

Initially, I worked personally with Alex; he was responsible for the concepts and branding. After these parts of the work had been finished, three more designers were attracted to finalize and polish the work, with Alex watching and coordinating their actions.

Can you share any outcomes?

With the help of Versions, we managed to make our first internal release less than two months after the development started, which is even more impressive considering that the company we worked with before that hadn't managed to release anything valuable in the whole year.

Already in half of the year after the project's beginning, we went public and started to attract users, and in yet another three months we had found our first investments.

How effective was the workflow?

In the most intense work period, we had daily team meetings via Zoom, while almost all routine questions had been being solved in Slack. I cannot say anything about the workflow between our teams because they literally were a part of our team.

Versions prototyped interfaces in Figma, everyone from the development team had permanent access to the prototypes throughout all the working process. Everyone could ask any questions to Versions in Slack and, if the question couldn't have been resolved in a few minutes, we left it for the daily meeting.

What did you find most impressive?

It wasn't just a formal collaboration; they really did care about the project's future. Alex and others from Versions had never been just wage-earners ready to do anything we asked; they questioned the value of any of our ideas and carefully improved it or even rejected it if needed.

They strengthened our strengths and leveled our weaknesses, knowing what we needed instead of just doing what we said.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I don't see anything that should have been done differently from the Versions side.