TL;DR - fixed three month contract as general UI/UX, digital brand and general process consultant. Created a UI from scratch for an extremely complex financial investment application. Revised their brand and provided them with a full set of style guides and documentation; redesigned their web presence and generally retuned their brand. Generally upped their presentation and general visual presence.
Jake Perman-Garr of Datavore contacted me in early 2016 - his startup was basically working on an application that was so powerful and versatile that it needed to be tamed and focussed into a single set of use cases before it could be properly evaluated as a product: and so they wanted to talk about defining the product and how to sell that to potential users.
Once I came in and chatted with them I was hooked:
Datavore is basically an extremely compressed database built inside your browser, which enables the user to manipulate any data in any format - spreadsheets, vcfs, tabulated data - and then save that data as a set of states. These states can then be used to create complex algorhythms by combining with one another to create snapshots, enabling the user to fully explore the data.
Once I came in and chatted with them I was hooked:
Datavore is basically an extremely compressed database built inside your browser, which enables the user to manipulate any data in any format - spreadsheets, vcfs, tabulated data - and then save that data as a set of states. These states can then be used to create complex algorhythms by combining with one another to create snapshots, enabling the user to fully explore the data.
We started off with a deep dive into the competition's UI - MS Excel and Tableau
Based on these UI conventions and in order to drive communications forward, we began to white board and paper sketch ideas for how the UI might work, based on fragments of existing UI and a small amount of UX savvy:
As we were carrying out this process of sketching, I was able to conduct a pretty decently detailed survey of our stakeholders (AKA the staff at Datavore) in order to outline the scope of what we were doing and create a focus for everyone on the team.
This then led to an initial UX presentation / meeting where I used the seven stage product lifecycle diagram to get agreement on what we were and were not doing
Once out of the exploratory phase of whiteboarding and notepadding out a basic idea for the application, I set to work figuring out and presenting a basic UI look and feel. We created a number of light PDF interactive mockups and played around with basic style of how to present the information we'd wireframed.
There was an awful lot of work around how the application's native Excel-style markup could be augmented using prompts and overlays in order to react and respond to GUI activity elsewhere on the page:
As we went through the process of exploring anmd finalising the UI, the user journeys and the personas involved in creating our UCD schemas also became useful in explaining to the crew in Dataover how their brand should work and how their brand reaches their customers and resonates with the customers idea of what the products "is for" or "does"
This lead to some really great workshops, a really neat logo and some very strong documentation to leave the crew with.
This lead to some really great workshops, a really neat logo and some very strong documentation to leave the crew with.
