Fuzzy Math

What was the scope of their involvement?

Fuzzy Math spent a lot of time cultivating a thorough understanding of each of our brands. They interviewed departments within our organization that had a vested interest in the property sites. For each of our multiple brands, they met with our branding, digital, analytics, and product development teams for the individual properties. Our lead product developer informed their design decisions. They arranged meetings with our stakeholders to understand our standards and desired look and feel.

Our UX team ensured they were designing a digital design system that's compatible with the one we had in place. 

Our corporate site and 11 individual brand sites with over 700 individual properties each have a distinct personality. Fuzzy Math excelled at tapping into the needs of every single one. They showcased unique activities surrounding our resort properties and positioned our city-based hotels as suitably geared for conferences.

By extracting existing metrics and analytics, they showed us how our existing property sites were performing; most were outdated and broken. After studying user behavior, they determined what our audience needs and used those findings to inform our future designs. 

During the visual and structural refresh, we conducted user testing to see if flat or nested types of navigation performed better. They generated metrics for everything, down to the millisecond of time it took users to complete tasks or find information. Flatter navigation with a long scroll performed better and was highly preferred by our end users. 

By doing this project, we created a single website code base that uses responsive design. The information on the screen adapts based on whether you’re looking at a desktop, a laptop, a tablet, or a mobile device. The templates were optimized for SEO as well, which was paramount for us as we saw a huge uptick in traffic coming to our site.

What is the team composition?

For each brand, they assigned us an interaction designer and a visual designer. There was a design lead overseeing those teams. 

How did you come to work with Fuzzy Math?

We met at a conference in Chicago. My director of UX had worked with the team before and knew their co-founder through UX conferences.

Initially, we invited several firms to pitch and chose Fuzzy Math based on their expertise and UX design skill. They were capable of building responsive property templates with SEO for our individual property sites.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent $850,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked together from September 2016–2017.

What was the scope of their involvement?

In addition to the compliance dashboard project and an analytics dashboard for our publisher partners, one of the most important projects they worked on was a UI overhaul for one of our products. They took a holistic approach and analyzed our website. Once that was complete, they gave us an evaluation of what was working and what could be designed better.

We discussed our vision, and they came up with a few different versions of what they thought would benefit us. After we gave them feedback, they built updated wireframes and came up with a solidly consistent look and feel for us. It’s clean and concise, and includes a comprehensive pattern library. They created a fantastic, living document with embedded HTML. There is no guesswork on how to build each icon or button, all we have to do is grab it and insert it into the code whenever we want to make changes.

What is the team composition?

We interacted with a team of three or four people, including a project lead and a design lead. It was good to have a mix of people working on the project, since they each brought a different opinion and viewpoint to guide the process.

How did you come to work with Fuzzy Math?

My former boss discovered them and brought them in for the first projects we did with them. The first project was the single-page compliance dashboard, which they did a good job on. I liked their working style, so when the time came to redo my UI, I immediately reached out to them about the project.

How much have you invested with them?

I believe we’ve spent around $80,000 with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We’ve worked with them on several projects, but the UI redesign started around January 2016 and ran through April 2016.

What was the scope of their involvement?

For each project, I talk through our high-level needs with their CEO. He makes sure he understands our business needs and scopes out all their services. They refine the requirements, make recommendations, and get up to speed on the application. We give a demo of the application as needed and they interview us and our existing clients to build a case document. We make changes and they build a low-fidelity wireframe. We agree on the functionality and they then work on high-fidelity designs. They’ll then either hand the product over to our developers or collaborate with us to complete the product.

Our most recent project was adding functionality to a scheduling system for human resources. They helped us build a variety of views. A user can look at the scheduling app within our app by day, by week, by month, by asset, by tech, and by customer. It’s a complicated system with a lot of moving parts.

What is the team composition?

I interact directly with their CEO and our product manager works with a point of contact on their team. I am not as involved with the process, so I only interact with a few people on their team.

How did you come to work with Fuzzy Math?

A contracted project manager of ours was looking for Chicago-based teams that were local to him. He did all the research and we chose them based on his recommendation. We were so impressed with their initial work with us that we had them build out our new pages and functionality for an application and they became our go-to UI/UX contractor.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together initially in 2014. The most recent project with them began in November 2017 and finished around June 2018.

What was the scope of their involvement?

In the first engagement we had a series of projects, the first of which had a pretty broad canvas and set the tone of our continued work with Fuzzy Math. We told them that it was our main product, so we wanted them to be relatively unconstrained in how they thought about a new version of it. We gave them the major components, some of the main use cases (which had to be available to everyone), some of the edgier ones, and some of the ones we considered redundant, which would be disposed of or moved to a more obscure part of the application. We then gave Fuzzy Math freedom in working with the product from a proposal perspective. We also gave them access to customers and had them participate in a couple calls.

Fuzzy Math had the chance to conduct their own studies, some of which we were involved in. They also got to talk to our services team, including the helpdesk, to get a perspective of what the current product problems were. We also engaged them with two of our customers that had their own UX teams, and were interested in helping us on this front. Those were great, forward-thinking companies, committed to simplifying the overall experience for their users.

We handled the implementation ourselves, but Fuzzy Math did create some live prototypes for us, as well as delivering some frontend JavaScript examples. They primarily returned design documents, including wireframes and a style guide. It was mostly static collateral, but this is what we needed.

We brought Fuzzy Math in very early with Catalytic, our second engagement, because we didn’t have many resources as a startup. Having someone work with us on a contract basis made a lot of sense since we needed many more people to focus on specific areas. Fuzzy Math worked on a part of our app that we didn’t have the resources to develop, but that needed to be started quickly. We wanted someone to put a lot of attention into what it might look like, what types of functionalities it should have, the API design, and how it would impact the main part of the app. All of these things can have a lot of interplay.

Fuzzy Math also helped us think through this part of our app and set it out from beginning to end. We had them involved in the core part of the app as we started to put out out engineering-heavy product. We involved a design director so it wouldn’t be so heavily focused on engineering, but he easily became overwhelmed having to manage an entire team alone, so we knew we needed help and a specialized UX perspective. Fuzzy Math offered a lot of feedback, which was great. They were acting as early potential users while also providing feedback from a UX standpoint. This all worked out very well.

What is the team dynamic?

The initial project was more of a heavy lift, and we had more people involved in it on a fulltime basis. I’m not sure how many people were involved behind the scenes, but we actively saw at least 3 people.

After the initial phase, we started focusing on specific areas for Fuzzy Math to target so that we could make incremental improvements. Once we went into that mode, we retained 1.5-3 resources. The scope tapered off from both our ends after the first engagement because we wanted them to come in and take bite-sized chunks.

How did you come to work with Fuzzy Math?

I went to a couple of my peers in the Chicago tech community and asked about a company that focused on UX. I didn’t want designers, but rather people who could work on user experience, making the product feel better instead of looking better. One of my initial impressions during the search process was that there wasn't a lot of differentiation between visual and user experience design.

Many of the initial people I reached out to were more focused on the aesthetics. A few of my friends came back with Fuzzy Math, which made me feel good about the choice. We also looked at another company, but the referrals and recommendations from the friends I trusted, and who’d actually had hands-on experience with Fuzzy Math, were the primary decision-making criteria.

I’ve had a similar experience with Fuzzy Math across my current company and SAP Fieldglass. The fact that I’ve used them across multiple companies probably says something in and of itself.

How much have you invested with them?

The SAP project took place a long time ago., so I can’t accurately recall the cost. It was a small part of our overall budget, and I may not have had a lot to do with the payment. Over the course of our multiple-year collaboration, the overall cost may have surpassed $900,000.

The project at our current startup is a more significant part of the budget, but overall, it’s still small.

What is the status of this engagement?

The initial project ran for 6 months, from the initial information-gathering and interview phase, to the design iterations. We then went into an ongoing mode, continuing to work with Fuzzy Math all the way into 2015. I'm not sure when we first engaged them, but the collaboration ran for at least 6 years.

The Catalytic project started in early 2016. Fuzzy Math worked with us for 2-3 months, after which we set up an in-house UX team. This approach is more central to what we do, and the differentiation we have as a company. We would definitely continue to use then if we didn’t have an internal team, and I will still probably reach out to them for augmentation. Fuzzy Math has been very helpful, despite the fact that we’re not using them officially right now.