Portfolio of Caesar Zwolle

Peerby

Sharing great products with people nearby.

With over 250.000 members, Peerby is a promising peer-to-peer sharing and rental platform for durable consumer goods. Its business model combines membership with rental and insurance, resulting in an easy, secure and community-based way of sharing products with people nearby.

At Peerby, I was responsible for the creation, implementation and validation of design strategy and user experience.

Contributions / 2015 - 2017

Introduction of rental business model, including listing-based supply. Supply- and demand experience design, including fulfilment flows. Value proposition experimentation, including insurance model, geographic expansion trials in New York, USA.

Design for impact

A design method that integrates vision- and learning-driven approaches.

During my time at Peerby, I developed Design for Impact, a framework that helps designers at startups create innovative products, services and systems that users will actually adopt. It merges two established approaches — ViP (a vision-driven method) and Lean methods (a learning and experimental approach) — into a single, integrated method.

The framework is built around a double-loop model: an upper loop focused on envisioning a desired future through vision and strategy, and a lower loop focused on validating that vision through iterative experiments and real-world learning.

Created for adoption

Alternating starting points drive adoption and mitigate risk

Designers enter the model at two starting points depending on the situation. When the need for direction is high and resources allow for it, they start with the vision loop. When uncertainty is high, they start with the experimental lower loop and let vision emerge from what they learn. A parallel vision + learning start is also possible, yet it's challenging to operationalise.

Once a product reached adoption, the lower loop is used to incrementally optimise it, until operational risk become proven and irrelevant, at which point the process starts again.

The core idea is that vision without learning leads to irrelevance and learning without vision lacks direction. Design for Impact balances both.