Planorama Design

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the founder of a blockchain based marketplace in the US in the music industry

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Planorama Design?

We needed to design a very simple UX/UI for a pretty complicated system that included onboarding, profiles, communications, file storage, and some crypto components which are notoriously difficult to work with in design.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

After many recommendations from colleagues, we selected Planorama based on their body of work and expertise, and the meticulous way they approach research, communication and design.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

We interviewed our target audiences across varying degrees of user sophistication to deeply understand the problem we are trying to solve. We focused on solving the problem with a clean simple solution that would create network effects and grow our user base. The result was a figma prototype we used to show our vision and raise capital.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We worked with Matt the founder and a team of two very talented designers who are also a joy to work with. They really treated the project as their own.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We have a clear roadmap for the product and design elements to build on. The project is being funded based on prototypes.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Excellent workflow and comms, as they use PPT and video record everything and store in a folder for your review at any time

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They have a really nice balance of engineering and design mentalities

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

NA

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Quality Assurance Manager of Vytal Studios. Vytal Studios is an extended-reality development organization.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Planorama Design, and what were your goals?

User Experience design, to create a mobile application augmented reality experience.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Worked with previously

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

A mobile app and learning management system built to deliver engaging, interactive, episodic, on-demand, and live content. Most legacy Learning Management Systems are built to track and administrate, not educate. Vytal online learning platform is built for learning first. Vytal Studios platform for corporations, higher ed, and other education and training organizations of all kinds are completely focused on knowledge and learning.

Of course, we track student progress and test scores. And of course, schools can create classes and link them to courses, and create learning paths of any kind, easily, and simply. Schools will be able to group and manage all their students. But most importantly, student content will be delivered in a way that they will be able to learn and excel in their chosen course of study.

Students get a world-class learning experience online, and on-demand education, without sacrificing the engagement of an in-class experience with the best instructors in front of all the students all the time.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

1 project manager, 1 product manager, 4 UX designers, 6 software developers, and 1 DevOps

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Everything was on time, every time.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Used Jira and Confluence for communicating.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their approach to UX design and documentation is way beyond most UX design companies; our development teams loved it.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

None that come to mind.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

Anonymous

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Planorama Design?

To amplify our brand and service to our clients we wanted to update apps that dated back to the early 2000's to have the look and feel you would expect of today's web apps. We also need to conduct user interviews to really understand what features were most helpful, what was missing, and which features could be deprecated.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We reviewed the offerings of several UX and UI design firms and short-listed 2. After seeing their presentation, it was clear to me that they possessed true expertise in best practices related to UI/UX Design. They offered a full-service shop that included documentation, user interviews, high fidelity designs, and internally had world-class project management staff to ensure timely delivery of the milestones. Furthermore, it was clear to me that Matt and his team were true professionals and made me feel at ease with putting them in front of my customers for the interviews.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

After completing the SOW and contract agreements we got right to work on the user interviews. We identified 4 external users and one internal user that was proficient with the tool. These interviews were conducted via Zoom and each one ran for about an hour. Something I loved about sitting in on these with Matt was his professionalism and thoughtful questions. Sometimes it felt like he could read my mind about a question that needed clarification.

Matt demonstrated excellent listening skills, ensured questions were well designed to elicit authentic responses from the users and were able to set appropriate expectations with the users regarding time to delivery and potential new feature enhancements (specifically, he made it clear that our company would determine that and his company had limited involvement in the overall project). He delivered these clarifications of expectations cordially and set the tone of sincerity that our company would expect in these interactions. Following the interviews, they delivered the feature map based on the feedback collected in the interviews.

This was robust and included future features that would assist the users in their reporting needs. They specifically called out the features that already existed, new features, and were able to identify a feature that could be depreciated. They mapped the features into 'functional' activities or pages and we agreed to tackle them within these groupings. We had weekly sprints, which included a mid-sprint review, to review the designs they created. They considered the technologies we had today to ensure the component libraries leveraged were already available to us (saving money and time for our firm as we entered the next phase of the project).

During the mid-sprints review, they always had more content and designs ready than I would have expected. It was clear to me that we were being treated as their primary priority and everyone was working to exceed our expectations at each meeting. When we had feedback or concerns in the designs (aesthetics, location of action buttons, divisions of the pages) they kindly listened, took notes, and asked clarifying questions. By the next meeting, they had made improvements and even thanked us for the feedback because they felt it elevated the designs.

They operated with our best interests in mind, didn't bring their ego into it, took our feedback, and implemented it. It was clear to me that they were truly passionate about user experience design and applied the predominant theories in the field in all their work. We were able to complete the project a week early and on a budget! The early delivery of the promised products was high quality, robust, and captured the full breadth of customers' most vital needs. I can count on one half of one hand the number of times I have worked with such a polished and professional firm. It made my job easy as I updated and informed my stakeholders of the progress of the project.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Matt -- Lead and project manager Jim -- Administrative lead Cristian -- designer Hugo -- Lead Designer

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

We were delivered high fidelity designs with inspectable components and features. We also retained copies of all the user interviews to leverage in future should we need to. The robust feature map identifies each item as a current feature, new feature for future development, and depreciated features. My internal stakeholders were thrilled with the designs that were delivered.

Our customers were excited about the investment to enhance the look and feel of the apps. My leadership received only good news throughout this project and were elated that it was completed on time and on budget. We did finish a week ahead of schedule without any negative impact to the quality and thoroughness of the resulting products. It is incredibly rare these days for a project manager to be able to say this. I cannot thank Matt and his team enough for making my job easy! They had exceptional service, world-class professionals, and high-end designs!

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflow between our teams was the best I have seen in my experience. Communication was timely and clear. Meetings were well prepared for and stayed on track. We set up a SharePoint site that they could save all the deliverables to, which they did in a timely manner following our sprint meetings. They were flexible with our technology requirements, security policies on acceptable use of applications, and even managing some of our more challenging stakeholders. Their compassionate desire to understand and address concerns really showed in the more challenging moments.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their professionalism, genuine passion for the work, and their ability to stay curious and empathic to the customers were most impressive. They were hard-working, timely, detail oriented, and always shooting to exceed expectations.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

There was a moment where one of my stakeholders grabbed control of meeting and forced the topic to devolve a bit. The meeting went a bit over time as a result and that same stakeholder seemed bothered by it because of a back to back meeting. My only advice in these moments would be to say something like "we are at time, should we schedule another meeting or continue" or "thanks for the feedback, we will consider this and address in the next meeting". Ultimately, it was incredibly minor and insignificant in my mind. Feedback is good to have though so I hope this is helpful and please know that finding any such moments were hard to recall.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the founder and chief product officer of Domain-U. We’re an online training company that focuses on episodic leaning.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Planorama Design?

We needed help with building our platform from scratch. We specifically needed to have a lot of sophisticated, development-ready documentation in order to be efficient.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Planorama Design is responsible for designing our platform and creating the documentation for our development team. That means that their team does much more than the wireframes; they’ve created all the user stories, scenarios, and acceptance criteria as well. They don’t write code, but they do provide a senior tech lead that acts as our CTO and reviews our codebase after it’s written.

The platform is both a web app and a mobile app. We launched the web app first because it made sense for our market. It works as a completely separate system from our mobile app. Planorama Design has helped us design both. 

What is the team composition?

Matt (President, Planorama Design) is my primary contact. We have eight team members, from design to tech leads to member structure people. 

How did you come to work with Planorama Design?

We’d worked with their team before. We brought them onto this project because it was going to be a very complex application with lots of user roles and some business logic. Every feature may have 10 different scenarios that each need to be designed before we hand it off to development. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent more than $300,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project started in April 2019 and is ongoing. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Our business is built around what Planorama Design has helped create. The product has launched, and customers love it. We’re still working on it with Planorama Design, though. 

How did Planorama Design perform from a project management standpoint?
They’re very responsive and organized. We have project managers on each side, host daily development meetings and weekly sprint reviews, and use Mattermost to stay in contact.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and Planorama Design is the best team I’ve ever worked with. They’ve created documentation that saves me hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on development; it’s so detailed that our development teams can implement it right the first time. They’re sophisticated and understand the need to create multiple scenarios beyond a simple wireframe.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The Planorama Design UX team, even if they have technical resources, is not a development organization. It’d be great to have it all under one roof to be more efficient, but that’s not a huge deal. 

Any advice for potential customers?

Listen to Planorama Design. It’s your project and you have to be clear on what you want to do, but they’ll come back to you with good ideas and suggestions about what to do and what to avoid. Listen to their advice; they know what they’re doing.