Smart transport powered by a design-led mission — How Cabify closed design feedback loops to 15 minutes with Marvel

Industry: Transportation
Key Feature: Prototyping
HQ: Madrid, Spain

Cabify is one of the biggest transport network companies in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world. Operating across South America and Europe, it has a presence in 15 countries. Marvel’s Sketch Plug-in and Commenting capabilities have allowed the company to build features for local markets faster and more efficiently than ever before.

“Historically, at Cabify, design has always taken a bit of a back seat,” explains Rene Galindo, a senior product designer for the company. Unlike businesses like Dropbox and Airbnb who have been lead from the front by designers, Cabify’s journey to realise the importance of design took a little longer.

“In the beginning, it was just one or two designers that would tackle different projects as and when they would come up.” But when the company decided to refresh the brand early in 2017, the absence of a design focused approach became problematic.

“The impact of the new brand made the company realize that differentiation through design was very important in the markets we were competing in,” says Rene. Prior to this revelation, the company hadn’t given as much thought to UX and UI as perhaps they would have liked to. Teams weren’t thinking about how the app felt to use, and departments outside of design and development rarely got involved in the process. “Which is fine when you’re small, but as the company grew, it added more friction to create new relevant features.”

So the company decided to take a more design focused approach to the whole business and the internal culture of the business was overhauled in favour of a more collaborative approach to app design.

From that pivotal moment, a newly formed team of seven designers started to look for new ways to standardise the design process and help incorporate other departments into making improvements quickly. That’s where Marvel came in.

“Marvel has become the first touch point between designers and the rest of the team” says Rene. Using the Sketch Plugin allows designers to quickly put their work into a format that could be shared throughout the team.

“In the beginning, it was just a designer and developer. When we’d finish a design, we’d walk over to our developer and show them what we had done.” Today however, things aren’t quite so simple. Cabify operates in 15 different markets, with each having its own set of unique requirements and country managers.

With the design team based in Madrid, they needed a solution that could be accessed anywhere by different teams. With Marvel, creating new designs and sharing them across territories and time zones became quicker and simpler. “We’re reducing the time it takes to produce and share a design by weeks.”

In the past eight months, the design team have been redesigning the app, adding new features and testing workflows every day. With Marvel, that process can now include the whole team.

Part of Cabify becoming a more design centric company has involved bringing non-traditional departments in to the design and development process. With Marvel, feedback and comments are built into the fabric of how the app works.

“Once we’ve designed something, we drop it into Marvel and product managers and engineering leads can jump in and suggest feedback,” explains Rene. The process has allowed the team to surface issues quickly and effectively, rather than relying on email threads or conversations that usually get lost in meeting rooms.

“It accelerates how fast we get feedback from the team, and how quick we move from design to development.” Comments and feedback, thanks to Marvel, arrive within minutes, rather than days, allowing problems to surface quickly.

Cabify’s journey from a startup to design centric international business highlights how important design has become to companies across the world. Design driven companies, according to Adobe, have outperformed the American stock market index by 228% over the last ten years, have more loyal customers and greater competitive advantage over those that don’t. Cabify, thanks to Marvel has become another example of that positive trend.