Creative Navy

What was the scope of their involvement?

First, we had the research phase. Creative Navy visited our gas stations and analyzed and researched the users. Then, they created a clickable prototype of the new system.

In the second phase, they worked on the design and user experience of our POS system. It’s the most advanced system on the market right now. We plan to improve it even more.

What is the team composition?

I worked closely with their managing partner, a UI expert, a UX expert, and a lead designer.

How did you come to work with Creative Navy?

A colleague recommended a consultant to me. The consultant connected us with Creative Navy. We were astonished to find out they were native speakers of German. They were able to communicate with our staff very well in both German and English, which worked really well for understanding the tasks and testing the prototype. They were very intelligent and understood our system quickly.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent €60,000 ($73,691 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from September 2017–January 2018.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Creative Navy helped us step by step with structuring all sorts of information. They started with researching our pain points and trying to better understand what our users wanted, how they used everything, and how they took advantage of our services. They generated marketing insight for us.

They then built the framework for the web app with a redirect methodology. We worked through it section by section. They used the same process and integration for both Android and iOS. The app provided call management, meeting room rental, messaging and payment services. They helped us with the frontend and user experience and interface design.

What is the team dynamic?

I was in communication with two team members most of the time.

How did you come to work with Creative Navy?

We sent out proposals to a few agencies, but we saw that Creative Navy had a lot of expertise and had worked with many clients. They were a great fit for us. After talking to them, we found that we were on the same wavelength—we were both results-oriented and very focused on the work.  We also liked their structured approach and application of psychology to their design work.

How much have you invested with them?

Around £55,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from June 2016 until March 2017.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We worked with Creative Navy to create a concept, and they consulted with and helped us produce a basic prototype for the visual UX for our platform. The visual representation they created is for the interaction between humans and the AI component of the car, so there were some UI/UX components involved.

Basically, it was an abstract representation of a human voice, some kind of a waveform, and then we had all of these interactions, like what the user says and how the system should respond to it, and then how the flow of interaction should be so that the system looks as human as possible. It had to behave like you had an assistant next to you in the car. This was the intended UX Creative Navy designed.

We shared our ideas. They turned them into visual interpretations and workflows. We then worked together to see how we could improve them and achieve a better result over several iterations. It was not a very long project, but it turned out well.

It was pretty challenging to convey a concept that enables a machine to appear human. It was kind of like a Turing test. It’s not easy to make a flow that makes the users think the machine is alive and can communicate with the user in a seamless manner. This was the main challenge.

We didn't get to the testing phase. Mostly this is still confidential work, but we have some internal testing for ours, and we also have extensive validation in the industry. Basically, we discuss this project all the time with our partners and potential customers to see where this should be heading and how it should perform.

How did you come to work with Creative Navy?

I worked with Creative Navy in the past on a different project for a different company. We’re the kind of people where if we have something that works, we won't try to change it. We had a positive previous experience with them, so we continued working with them.

​​​How much have you invested with them?

We’ve invested about $6,000. 

What is the status of this engagement?

I think we started sometime in January 2017, and our work together finished by the end of February. It was a short-term project. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Creative Navy designed a tool and created the user experience and interface for this project. They helped us understand how to design the digital tool so the process could be improved.

When we first met, my team manager, my project manager, and also the agents were involved in communicating our objective. At the beginning, Creative Navy did a lot of research. All our staff and also the agents were doing the groundwork. Creative Navy created a few modern software applications for us, which they tested and delivered to us as an experiment. Some things worked very well and others needed improvements. 

We had some ideas at the outset that they agreed to, but there were others where they recommended another approach. They explained why and let us test both our approach and theirs. The results spoke for their recommendations.

Throughout the process, they had to be meticulous and creative at the same time. They used a psychological approach, which worked very well. We were able to reduce the working time by more than half, which is fantastic because I only need half of my staff to meet the targets. The error rate was reduced even more. We had a competitor who worked in parallel with us and they are now out of service because we have this tool. It helps us with both efficiency and quality. 

The data collection tool is used internally, but we use it for a client of ours as well. Our client sells furniture online. He’s the largest furniture vendor in the German/European market. He does not produce the furniture but gets it from other companies. They send him all of their catalogs. They could be hard copy or on PDF. We need to extract the relevant data in order to upload them in his system. This is what we needed the tool for. 

How did you come to work with Creative Navy?

I did online research. I could not find anyone in my area that convinced me to work with them. I started to talk with Dennis [Creative Director & Strategic Brand Marketing] from Creative Navy. We had some good chats. He’s also fluent in German, which is a great advantage for us because this kind of project is about data collection. It’s a big benefit if you also understand what it’s about. We talked and I showed him some samples. He came up with an idea. I liked that they had a psychological approach. This was exactly what I was looking for because we needed to make the interface extremely user-friendly. It was very important for lowering the error rates and to make the processing operate more efficiently. 

How much have you invested with them?

We have invested between $20,000 and $30,000.

What is the status of this engagement?           

We started working together in October 2016 until May 2017.