Nate
Vogels

The Problem

When I joined Tipico, the app was ranked 12th overall by Eilers & Krejcik (a gaming industry publication that independently rates and ranks sportsbook apps quarterly). More telling: 17th in UX, 22nd in features. A customer survey made it concrete — 52% of customers said our interface and UX was worse than competitors.

The core symptom: it was genuinely hard to place a bet. You'd navigate to a sport, select a game, pick your outcome — and then get routed to a separate betslip page, losing your place in the app. Building a parlay meant bouncing back and forth repeatedly.

The Approach

I led an OKR-based product roadmap rooted in Mixpanel behavioral data. We tracked session start, page navigation, outcome selection, and bet placement events to calculate conversion rate and time-to-bet. This gave us precise baselines and a feedback loop for every change we shipped.

The biggest unlock: converting the betslip from a standalone page into a persistent drawer accessible from anywhere in the app. We launched an MVP through GrowthBook A/B testing to validate direction before full rollout. Even the MVP moved conversion from 17.8% to 21.6% and dropped straight-bet time from 2.9 to 2.5 minutes.

The full rollout paired the new betslip architecture with comprehensive UI updates across home, navigation, events, league pages, and my bets — plus a full refresh of the brand visual language ahead of the Ohio market launch.

Outcomes

The Discovery

My team conducts regular in-person field visits — sitting alongside Western Union agents in physical store locations and walking through their experience. What we found: 67% of all money transfer transactions are repeat transactions from the same customer to the same receiver. Yet repeat transaction time (3 min 9 sec) was barely faster than starting a new transaction (3 min 45 sec).

Agent commentary was direct: "Customers ask what delivery service they used last time and can't remember." "Most of our customers have sent before, but WUPOS doesn't save the info so we enter it every time." "I wish there was a way to copy what worked last time."

The Design Challenge

Western Union's transaction platform has hundreds of compliance and legal triggers — country restrictions, send/receive amount thresholds per corridor, requirements based on payment and pickup method. Surfacing a "repeat this" feature meant navigating a significant API and architecture challenge, not just a UI change.

We ran two design explorations before landing on the final solution: a streamlined customer lookup embedded directly in the Send Money flow, with a receiver selection list that pre-populates transaction fields. Two iterations resolved performance and API sequencing issues that early explorations surfaced.

Outcomes

The Problem

Zestful is an employee perks platform powered by Stripe card-issuing — companies give employees a perk card loaded with funds for specific categories (food, wellness, learning, etc.). The problem: ~30% of card transaction attempts declined. Of those, ~50% were due to insufficient funds — customers didn't know their balance.

We triangulated this through support data in Intercom (many tickets were customers asking "why did my card decline?"), declined transaction analysis by reason code in Stripe, and customer surveys that surfaced the core insight: people were "out and about" with no way to check their balance or their category restrictions.

The Solution: Focused MVP

Rather than building a full mobile application, we identified the minimum that would solve the core pain: a balance check screen showing category breakdowns, and push notifications for decline events. Three user stories drove the entire MVP: check balance before a purchase, understand what the card covers, and get notified when a decline happens so you can troubleshoot immediately.

This focus let us ship in 2 months. The lean scope was a deliberate product decision — we validated the hypothesis before investing in a full mobile experience.

Outcomes

The Problem

Tennis players who want to find a match face a genuinely fragmented problem: private leagues are expensive and poorly organized, Facebook groups have low success rates, and existing apps have inactive user bases. None of them show availability, match skill levels accurately, or enable in-app coordination without exchanging personal contact info.

What I Built

As co-founder and the sole PM + designer, I was responsible for the entire product: roadmap strategy, design, research, data analytics, and customer support. We launched the app in 2 months with five core features: an activity feed, a player discovery list with skill-based filtering, availability matching, in-app messaging, and match recording with a leaderboard.

Post-launch iteration was rapid. The filter experience was redesigned to apply universally across the app (not just player search). Availability was automated with "typical availability" that pre-populated each week. A gender preference setting was added after women reported receiving unwanted requests. In-app safety tools (report, block, delete) were shipped after early feedback.

Outcomes & Takeaways

10,000+ users, 1,000+ DAU, and 5,400+ matches recorded in the first 3 months — with strong engagement metrics. We wound down due to monetization challenges, not product quality. The app found real product-market fit on engagement, and the user feedback loop shaped meaningful feature improvements within the launch window.

The Problem

As a cooking hobbyist, I've always found recipe apps frustrating — not for lack of content, but because they're designed to maximize ad impressions, not to help you actually cook. Allrecipes is cluttered, Tasty is video-first in ways that don't help when your hands are covered in flour, and Yummly's personalization adds interface complexity without enough payoff.

Half Baked Harvest has some of the best recipe content on the internet, with a strong visual brand and loyal following. The concept: what if that content lived in a mobile app designed around the cooking moment — not the browsing moment?

Research & Personas

I defined two primary personas: Jessica (28, tech professional, beginner cook who needs step-by-step visual guidance and grocery planning) and Andre (35, software developer and father of two who needs quick, family-friendly recipes without the clutter). Their pain points converged: interfaces that get in the way, no good way to plan meals from discovered recipes, and a lack of clear visual guidance during the actual cooking step.

Design Approach

The core information architecture was scoped tightly: Home (featured + personalized + trending), Recipe Detail (overview, ingredients, step-by-step with visuals), Search (advanced filters, cuisine categories), a Recipes collection (saved + planned), Shopping List (consolidated, checkable), and Profile. Every feature justified against one of the two persona use cases.

Visual design pulls directly from the Half Baked Harvest brand — warm tones, clean typography, generous use of food photography. The recipe detail screen is the centerpiece: tabbed between Overview, Ingredients, and Directions, with one-tap add-to-shopping-list and similar recipe suggestions below.