Award Winning Graphic & Experience Design
- UX/UI Design
- $50,000 to $199,999
- May 2015 - Ongoing
- Quality
- 5.0
- Schedule
- 5.0
- Cost
- 5.0
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
"PLATFORM was doing things better than we could have hoped for, and in an incredibly responsive manner."
- Other industries
- San Francisco, California
- 201-500 Employees
- Phone Interview
- Verified
PLATFORM helped with marketing efforts by showcasing internal client case studies. They designed, prototyped, and developed interactive pages on the website, and augmented internal UX teams on various projects.
PLATFORM helped gain clients, win awards, and garner prestige for the company. They are scalable, accommodating, understanding of ultimate goals, and the team requires minimal oversight. PLATFORM excels both technically and creatively, and is highly proactive, competent, and responsive to feedback.
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
BACKGROUND
Introduce your business and what you do there.
During my collaboration with PLATFORM, I was working for an international ad agency with clients like Facebook, Google, Twitter, City Group, Adobe, and a number of other large worldwide players on the roster. We mainly provided commercial-based projects, as well as web and digital services. The studio itself has a couple of shops—one in New York and one in San Francisco—and had a team of 20-30 people at the time of working with PLATFORM. I was the user experience [UX] lead, working underneath the director of UX.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What challenge were you trying to address with PLATFORM?
We had a wealth of work come in. Our agency was busting at the seams in terms of managing everything, and we had our own proactive outreach efforts. We were showcasing the work we were doing in order to win business. We won a number of awards for our projects and PLATFORM was brought in to help us with this.
SOLUTION
What was the scope of their involvement?
PLATFORM started with the design and development of our case studies and other work on our website, and the engagement grew from there. We also started bringing them into other projects, especially the ones based out of the New York office, since the time zone worked well.
In the very beginning, we had PLATFORM working on 4-5 projects concurrently. They were helping out with UX design primarily, at the time. We were working with another group for development, but also started assigning this portion to PLATFORM. Once we realized how good they were, we assigned other work to them. Those were full-scope projects where PLATFORM helped in terms of design.
On one of the bigger projects, we had a tight timeline. It was midway through UX and design. PLATFORM was brought in and built incredibly elaborate prototypes for us, which were live and interactive. Seeing them live on the web, someone wouldn’t have known the difference. They were interactive to the point of feeling just like the real thing.
We used a tool for not only helping the client understand what we’d been showing them and the outcome of what we were discussing, but also to give them a tangible product, which would help us refine it along the way. This was incredibly important, since there are things that look good on paper, but, as soon as they’re actually implemented, we have to make modifications and tweaks. By doing this stuff upfront, we could get to a level of detail and understanding far before we actually got to the point of producing it. As such, we ended up with a much better product, and worked very fast.
As we evolved, some of the projects became commercial ones, not just internal case studies.
What is the team dynamic?
We had calls, but PLATFORM also assigned a few people to our office, so we could actually have someone side-by-side. In the very beginning, we were working with around 4-5 people. As our needs grew, PLATFORM was accommodating in scaling with us. At the time I stepped away from the company, there was another small team working independently with my team in New York. There were 3 people working with our team in San Francisco. There were around 10 people in total at the time, including developers, but I don’t know how much the teams grew overall.
How did you come to work with PLATFORM?
Our industry is quite small in the sense that the people in it know each other. Lucas was someone our CEO had known since around 2004. We had put out a help post, looking for someone to partner with us. PLATFORM reached out and we got to talking. They had been producing a lot of good work, and we had seen them coming up in the ranks. In the early days, there were only a couple of us coming up in the field, trying to make waves.
How much have you invested with them?
Usually, our case studies have somewhat smaller budgets, between $50,000 and $85,000 for the bulk of the work. As we started the collaboration, we scaled up, so it was probably higher than that. We negotiated subsequent work on a project-by-project basis. There was no fixed fee per se, because the involvement changed based on the project. We might have needed a single person, or their entire team.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working with PLATFORM around the end of May or June 2015. I started working with them personally around then, in order to kick things off. I departed in mid-to-late August, and PLATFORM was still working with the company. I still keep in touch, and I heard the collaboration is ongoing.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
We tend to win industry prestige and awards without really applying for them. We’ve won some for our case studies, and recognition beyond that. One of the ones PLATFORM worked on was a shopping fantasies case study, a look at what reimagining shopping online could be. Getting industry prestige was fantastic, since it brought in better clients.
The prototype project we brought PLATFORM on was a big thing with our client, who’d had a limited engagement with us. This was a working test, and the prototype we produced impressed them enough to give us the full engagement. I attribute this to PLATFORM since, if it wasn’t for the quality they produced, and the care they put in, we would’ve struggled. The other partners we’d used would deliver 80% of what we wanted to illustrate and express to clients. With PLATFORM, is was more like 99-100%. They had more technical prowess than others we’d used in the past, and were able to execute things we were conveying in both the user experience side and the interactive animation side of things. We won that project just as I was leaving the company, and it was huge for us. I’m sure there were more after it, but I wasn’t around for those.
How did PLATFORM perform from a project management standpoint?
PLATFORM understood what we were doing and required very little oversight from our end. We had introductory conversations for each of the deliverables, which they ran with.
They did a great job in terms of project management. Working with a team is fantastic, since I was able to talk to their point person (as could the rest of the team) either in-person or via writing or video call. PLATFORM took things and ran with them. If there was a question, they were incredibly responsive.
We had worked with teams in the past which had questions, but didn’t necessarily ask them, or made us aware late, at the last minute. Lucas and his team brought things up immediately, even in the middle of the night. For the most part, there were few of those, since they understood what we were doing. PLATFORM could take something and produce, so we’d be able to give feedback like we would to a member of the team, rather than to a third-party. We usually had to guide partners to get them close to what we were trying to do, but, with PLATFORM, it was the opposite. We would give them finite feedback and make little tweaks, rather than having a completely wrong result.
It all comes down to communication. They were verbal, quick, and on top of things, which is fantastic from a project management perspective. It meant I could spend more time guiding and talking with the team, and less time managing third parties.
What did you find most impressive about them?
We had used several different agencies over the years, trying to find the right partner in terms of development. We used to have in-house developers, but it was great to have PLATFORM, since they could do exactly what we envisioned and we were tightknit. Once, we gave them a few technology-based products; they were amazing at knocking them out of the park. PLATFORM was doing things better than we could have hoped for, and in an incredibly responsive manner. It was a big thing for us, since some of the other shops were slow and not very responsive. Working with them was tough, but when PLATFORM came in, it was like having an extension of our own team.
They’re very conceptual. We could give them the nugget of an idea, and PLATFORM would flesh it out, producing a fantastic result. They’re strong in terms of design and incredibly strong with development. It’s fantastic to have met and worked with PLATFORM. Their development prowess allowed us to push projects out the door exactly how we were thinking. They had their own team working on conceptual things in isolation, and came back with fresh ideas which we’d oftentimes implement.
Are there any areas they could improve?
I didn’t have any complaints or gripes working with the PLATFORM team. I only worked with them for a couple of months, but, based on that time, it felt like they were hired as part of our team, versus being a third-party.
RATINGS
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Quality
5.0Service & Deliverables
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Schedule
5.0On time / deadlines
"They were fantastic at meeting the deadlines, especially with the first project. Our CEO tended to change his mind, but they kept up."
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Cost
5.0Value / within estimates
"PLATFORM was more competitively-priced than others we’d worked with. We felt comfortable giving them more work, and didn’t worry that the cost would get too high."
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Willing to Refer
5.0NPS
"I’ve referred them several times since then.