I’ve been getting coached by an awesome Google Designer (Pt 1- Unpacking)
In October, I started working 1:1 with an amazing designer named Xander Pollock.
Xander is a badass.
He worked on Inbox by Gmail… and before that, he co-founded a company (Punchd) and sold it to Google.
Xander and I met through 500 Startups (he was in batch 1)
and he’s been teaching me about Google Venture’s process of UX design
GV has written about this process here, but it’s a whole different story to learn it directly from someone who has done this process with the GV team, who can customize the process just for you & can give you an accountability structure (which I need. Xander and I video chat once a week and I have homework).

So there are 5 steps in the process:
- Unpack
- Sketch
- Decide
- Prototype
- Test
I’ve been applying these steps to the way I built Art Collecting School, which launches as part of the ‘test’ phase tomorrow.
The unpacking process was really fun.
- I got on the phone with a bunch of Kollecto users. We talked about art & what they wish they knew about art, but mainly we talked about non-art stuff: their favorite books, things they’re proud of, guilty pleasures, etc.
- I wrote personas for the 5 different types of users we have at Kollecto (I later built this into an art collecting lesson. See lesson #2 of Art Collecting School)
- I wrote a bunch of user stories for each of the personas

- I did a competitive analysis, mainly focusing on the cool things that MoMA, Sotheby’s, Christie’s & Museum Hack are doing in the art education space
- And I developed some clear KPIs I would use to measure success for Art Collecting School

And then I jumped into Part 2, Sketching, which was my favorite part!
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Hi there- My name is Tara Reed & I’m the founder of Kollecto. I'm a non-technical founder building software without writing any code.I’m also a first-time entrepreneur who swore I'd never become an entrepreneur…Oh well, sh*t happens! :) Follow my journey as I build a cool art startup...