Canoo

Company

Team

Time

Role

Tools

Website

Website Team

4 months

Design Intern

Figma / Sketch / HTML, CSS, JS / Boba

www.canoo.com

Disclaimer: Due to confidentiality and proprietary information, I cannot release iterations of designs and/or work and can only post things from my internship that have been released to the public

Canoo is an electric vehicle startup company. Their atypical design of the car and business model assists them in revolutionizing the transportation scene in urban areas and cities. From a Forbes article “Canoo will be exclusively offered through a subscription model. No long term commitments, just one flat monthly price to drive a vehicle.”

I joined at an exciting time within the last 3 months before Canoo would release their car to the public for the very first time (end of Sep 2019). Due to this momentous occasion, the website had to go through an overhaul and various stages to market this event.

As an intern under the design department, I worked closely with the person In Charge of Website, Tsz (pronounced ‘Z’) and was tasked to assist him in developing and designing the new site (mobile, tablet, and desktop) in its entirety since it had four stages:

Marketing (Redesign of former current site)
Pre Reveal
Reveal
Post Reveal

There were initial designs for stage 1 my boss designed prior to when I came on, so I translated them into a live site with my front end and computer science background with HTML, CSS, and JS. There were many iterations we had to go through due to technical limitations and so I tried to incorporate my feedback and ideas.

Because time was of the essence, we collaborated on designing and coding so while I was coding for the marketing site, my boss would be starting designs for the next stage (pre reveal). He also asked me to help him and start drafting some basic wireframes of the pre reveal site. During the first few weeks of the internship, there was a learning curve to learning new libraries (ScrollMagic) and coding practices (CSS techniques), but over time I became faster and changes were developed much faster.

MARKETING SITE

Since the reveal stage just required users to sign up via mail chimp for our newsletter, my major design contributions were in the pre and post reveal stage where I used Sketch.

Throughout these stages of the site, I asked Tsz for constant feedback on my designs and from there, we got approval or further feedback from people within the marketing/product team during our meetings. People within those team meetings included the people In Charge of Marketing & Brand Strategy, In Charge of Brand Design & Mobile, someone from Strategic Operations - Product & Launch, and the CPO.

Keeping in mind that I had to code these responsive designs, I tried to make it simple but also match the aesthetics of the Canoo brand. Even before approval, I designed and coded a lot of extra test sites of the ideas Tsz came up with in the event we got approval for some elements within the design faster than expected.

Since we were also launching our site in China, we had to design our site in Chinese and make some modifications since it would be the first iteration of the site (there was no marketing site live at the time).

I coded these samples and even the end products in a more modular way so when my internship ended (it ended before the post reveal stage went live), it would be easier for Tsz to complete the final version. In the end, not all elements of my designs were used but they were incorporated with Tsz’s so we had a mix of both design elements in the pre and post reveal site stages.

PRE-REVEAL SITE (ENG)

PRE-REVEAL SITE (CHI)

PRE/POST-REVEAL SITE (ENG CONT.)

IMPACT

The main outcome that came about this internship was that there was an increase in customer email newsletter subscriptions by 267% (during marketing-site stage). They had over 1100 new email addresses from their website signup from the launch of the new website in about a month. Before, Canoo only had 300 people sign up in the 1.5 years previous to that.

Brand awareness also increased during our pre-reveal site stage as special reveal invitations were sent out to VIPS, influencers, content creators, press, and various others as they were linked to the pre-reveal site. Hundreds of people attended the live reveal and even more read about it online from a range of media outlets.