iAsk

iAsk is an AI-powered answer engine that uses transformer neural networks to answer user questions, provide summaries of key pieces of information, and more. Following a successful round of fundraising in early 2024, iAsk partnered with DockYard to implement updated product designs meant to grow user trust, as well as build a subscription flow to support a new paid tier.

The resulting refresh and UX improvements helped support iAsk ’s growth from 1 million to 1.5 million daily searches, and its subscription-based iAsk Pro services would go on to outperform ChatGPT and other competitors.

“DockYard helped us get a head-start on our post-fundraise feature roadmap by seeding our engineering staff growth with a first-in-class team of developers and a highly professional and efficient process.”

—Brad Folkens, CTO & Co-Founder

The Challenge

The iAsk team came to DockYard with multiple goals that required a combination of design, UX development (UXD), and Elixir engineering expertise:

1. iAsk turned to DockYard’s design and UX Development teams to implement a landing page design refresh to demonstrate quick progress for investors and move away from a pre-built page template.
2. Building on an existing Elixir backend, iAsk required Elixir engineering support to implement a new subscription model to give paid users access to premium features.
3. Finally, the iAsk team needed UX Development support to implement a design system and layouts created by an external design firm.

iAsk’s original site was built using a publicly available template to reach users quickly. But after receiving feedback that the site looked outdated and amateur, the iAsk team worried that their existing site wouldn’t inspire enough trust in users to convince them to sign up for a paid subscription offering

The second challenge—building a subscription flow to onboard subscribers—was the cornerstone of iAsk’s partnership with DockYard. iAsk’s base product is free to use, but implementing a subscription model would give paid users access to premium features that aren’t available in the free tier while establishing a new business revenue stream for iAsk.

The Solution

With a tight deadline and investors looking for quick progress, our team took an iterative approach to bring high-value, low-effort changes to users early, all the while setting the stage for longer-term improvements that would take more time to execute.

“The DockYard team was very professional and organized. The team produced high quality, well-engineered code with excellent adherence to Elixir’s best practices with thorough test coverage.”

—Brad Folkens, CTO & Co-Founder

Design "Quick Wins"

The first step was a product design audit to address iAsk’s need for updates that inspired trust from its users. While a design system and wireframes for a major website overhaul were still taking shape, our team acted on iAsk’s desire to show progress to investors early and proposed key changes to the user experience that would be both impactful and quick to execute.

To make the search experience more cohesive and intuitive, our team suggested and implemented changes to the layout, language, and iconography supporting iAsk’s search bar. They also made improvements to the way information on the site was organized, categorized, and presented, as well as introduced more styling consistency throughout the site. The result was a user interface that was clearer and easier to navigate.

The design improvements to the primary landing page had an impact even before the end of iAsk’s partnership with DockYard and were the source of unsolicited positive feedback from a major investor.

New Subscription Feature

To continue building on the quick wins of improving iAsk’s product, our team implemented a subscription model that would unlock a new tier of premium features for paying customers.

Thanks to Elixir’s highly productive language and robust ecosystem, our engineering team was able to integrate iAsk’s product with the Stripe payment processing platform quickly, and add functionality and flows to enable users to manage their accounts and subscriptions. They also built a paywall feature and authorization layer to restrict access to features based on a user’s subscription plan.

Full Website Redesign

Once the wireframes for the larger website design overhaul were made available to DockYard, our UX development team took on the challenge of translating the design into code. They turned static designs into reusable components and introduced a Tailwind-based theming system to make it easier to apply app-wide branding changes in the future, such as changes to the color scheme or typography.

Using a combination of HTML and CSS best practices and techniques, as well as Phoenix’s component and templating system, the team produced a refresh that is modern, accessible, responsive, and maintainable.

Conclusion

At the start of its partnership with DockYard, iAsk faced a tight deadline and pressure from investors following a fundraising round, and grappled with a prototype-level product that didn’t inspire user trust

With a focus on flexibility and maximizing both budget and time, our team delivered quick, user-focused solutions to demonstrate progress for investors and helped set the stage for increased user trust with an updated product design and business-critical functionality. Altogether, that work supported iAsk’s already successful product and smoothed the way for even more growth in years to come.