Design for Crowd Intelligence & Spatial Analytics Platform
- UX/UI Design
- $200,000 to $999,999
- May - Oct. 2021
- Quality
- 5.0
- Schedule
- 5.0
- Cost
- 5.0
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
"The Brave UX team always worked with our feedback whether it was on schedule or not."
- Software
- Boston, Massachusetts
- 11-50 Employees
- Online Review
- Verified
A spatial analytics platform wanted to redesign the entirety of their analytics and mobile app. Brave UX helped them transition from a spatial data analytics dashboard into a more comprehensive app.
The company's initial reaction to the work provided to them by the Brave UX team was positive overall. They praised the clarity of the graphics and interactions as well as the consistency of navigation elements. This showed the team's attention to detail and internal consistency.
The client submitted this review online.
BACKGROUND
Please describe your company and your position there.
I am CTO and co-founder of Armored Things. We provide a software-only cloud-based crowd intelligence and spatial analytics platform for venues, campuses, and corporate environments that anonymously shows where people are, where they have been, and where they are likely to be.
It’s like traffic in Google Maps or Waze, but showing people, not cars, and with the ability to span the big picture patterns of life to the fine-grained detail of what is happening in smaller spaces like conference rooms and concession stands.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
For what projects/services did your company hire Brave UX?
We engaged with Brave UX to help us revisit and redesign the entirety of our analytics application and mobile app. They helped transition a spatial data analytics dashboard into a comprehensive application capable of actionable intelligence and analysis of people, patterns and flows.
After a discovery process, they led the effort to reimagine the information architecture and visual design. Our existing applications demonstrated the power of the data but didn't do a great job connecting that data to the needs and abilities of our users--resulting in lower than desired utilization.
And while we had good user data and feedback, we did not have the expertise on the team to design the capabilities, and we knew the existing features needed a more consistent and integrative user experience.
SOLUTION
How did you select this vendor?
We tapped our investor networks and their portfolio companies for recommendations, came up with a short list of several firms: two small firms and one very well-known design firm.
It was in the proposal discussion with the well-known firm that they recommended we really talk to Brave UX (who was not on our original list) as a better fit for our project. Following that surprise recommendation, I met with Lee (CEO and Founder) and was impressed with his approach, team and prior work.
Followed up with a couple of conversations with former startup clients and confirmed not only that Brave UX did outstanding work, but that they were likely to be a good collaboration and cultural fit with our team.
Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.
Our project started with a five-week discovery phase. This is a key part of the Brave UX process but one we didn't fully appreciate until we had gone through it.
It was during this phase that we learned more about our product than was ever documented and were finally able--with the help of Brave UX--to have a comprehensive view of features and a common language for the elements unique to our platform.
At the end of this process, we understood much of what needed to be designed and why and had a sense of the complexity and effort it would take. The discovery process was also a chance to see how we worked together and the results of that collaboration (there is no obligation to continue into the design phase).
Out of discovery, the Brave UX team proposed a series of ten overlapping sprints across broad feature areas including asset management, activity exploration, context integration, analytics, reporting and alerts.
The ordering was based on dependencies and certain foundational elements we previously learned. At a couple points along the way, we altered the plan when it became obvious that the level of effort in one area was more than we expected or still had a lot of open questions we had to answer.
We also shifted a few sprints around to accommodate our desire to focus on a new feature area that we felt had the potential to be highly differentiating.
Jenna, the project manager on the Brave UX team, always collaborated with us and communicated across both teams to make sure these changes did not lead to budget overruns or missed deadlines.
The flexibility and creative shuffling helped us finish on time and with everything we needed designed complete.
How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?
There were three dedicated people on our project and two additional designers that worked with us through the majority of sprints:
- Jenna (director of UX and project manager)
- Jessie (lead UX designer)
- Hannah J (UX designer); in addition,
- Hannah B (UX designer) and
- Liv (UX designer) both worked with us during the design phase.
Our regular internal team was drawn from product management, customer success, engineering, architecture and data science.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?
Our data and use cases are complex, and our team is biased towards technology and engineering. But Jenna, Jessie and the other designers were able to take each discussion and a lot of unstructured feedback and give it shape and meaning in a consistently thoughtful design, week to week.
We shared the design progress in feedback sessions with customer success, sales, and marketing. A few months into the engagement, we started previewing sequences and storyboards built from the high-fidelity wireframes with customers and prospects.
The initial reaction was universally positive with specific accolades for the clarity of the graphics and interactions, the consistency of navigation elements across functions, the flexibility with which assets could be managed or defined, and the surfacing and visualization of previously hidden information that helped understand accuracy, coverage and confidence in the data shown.
One of the unexpected--but certainly welcome--benefits of our engagement was a wider appreciation in the product team of what “end-to-end” solutions could be, how the user experience was as much a part of a solution as architecture and design.
A real example was when we were looking at service reliability for some contextual data sources: the engineering required designing for robust availability and failure handling, but after the entire experience considered, a better way of surfacing partial and unavailable data allows us to relax some of the availability handling and complexity--and still provide a better user experience for failures outside our control.
How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?
The team communicated frequently, stayed on schedule, met every milestone and commitment, kept our team engaged through twice-weekly collaboration and feedback sessions and a shared Slack channel, and were able to flexibly shift things around when we wanted to focus on a different feature area.
The working relationship felt more like working with one of our internal teams and less like working with an external agency. For both the discovery and design phases, they proposed, and we agreed to the schedule, areas of focus, and sprints.
The Brave UX team met with our cross-functional team twice a week for 1.5h each session. Our team would meet informally in between each session to organize our feedback and ideas and share them with the Brave UX team ahead of the next meeting.
We appreciated how materials (Figma designs, PDFs and meeting recordings) were made available right after each session. The meeting recordings were especially helpful and allowed us to share parts of discussions with others on the Armored Things team and helped anyone that might have missed a session.
We made all materials available internally so anyone can see the progress. The team was available and responsive between sessions, often chatting with us through Slack to flesh out open questions, share examples, ideas or exchange feedback.
The channel was open to all of Armored Things, so those that weren't part of the core team could track--and participate in--the discussions.
What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?
The team showed an attention to detail, relevance and internal consistency that was not strictly necessary for our project--but really made it easier to share the intermediate work with others and start getting feedback earlier.
For example, early on they researched and found a campus that could provide all the types of spaces needed for different tasks and use cases. They used believable names, values and quantities and maintained interrelationships between spaces and values across features and capabilities.
This made feedback and discussions easier, provided continuity as features were expanded or connected, and made showing or explaining the work to others easier.
Brave UX understands what it takes to have a successful project: the importance of the discovery process, an agreed upon plan for organizing feature sprints and delivering results, and high expectations of involvement and feedback from their collaborators.
This last point is important: you must be willing to commit the time, cross-functional capacity, and intellectual energy to the process for Brave UX to perform at their best. This is not an agency engagement where you just review the results monthly.
I was personally grateful to Lee for working with me to find flexibility around the financial timing and terms of our engagement since the discovery and design phases straddled the final stages of our Series A fundraising.
Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?
No. We sometimes needed more time to gather feedback between our working sessions but realized we couldn’t do that without a longer engagement. The Brave UX team always worked with our feedback whether it was on schedule or not.
RATINGS
-
Quality
5.0Service & Deliverables
-
Schedule
5.0On time / deadlines
-
Cost
5.0Value / within estimates
-
Willing to Refer
5.0NPS