A Lean Dream Operation

Surreal is a site where users can donate money to a charity and enter into a sweepstakes for a chance to go to a music festival with a friend as VIPs and experience once-in-a-lifetime activities with their favorite musicians all expenses paid.

Summary

I was brought on in the beginning ideation process to formulate technical and creative strategies to build this brand and website by the founder Ben Edelstein. Once the idea grew legs, I lead the design direction and product management of Surreal, bringing on additional developers and creatives from my network to assist in branding, marketing creative, content management, and engineering.

I worked with Addison Smyth, a colleague of mine to land on a logo that would set the tone for what Surreal was. He provided several rounds of concepts that we narrowed down over a couple revisions. We wanted to communicate something that would speak to an audience that was very aware of current social media trends and influencer spheres.  We also took into account what Surreal was providing to its potential end users and wanted something bold and exciting yet slightly dream-like and fleeting like the experiences we were creating for lucky winners.

The website needed to be built in a flexible manner that could handle complex data models due to multiple music festivals structuring their experiences with us differently from a case-by-case basis. This resulted in constant iterations and dynamic layout configurations to handle new data models that arose with each festival that partnered with us.

Upon Marketing pushes, we actively monitored Shopify’s data visualization tools, FullStory recordings and Google Analytics to improve the conversion funnel.  We made iterations on the fly to improve the user-experience real-time to quickly test and apply learnings.  With each campaign, we made slight adjustments to the information architecture, content, and UI to improve the user experience to boost donations.