Palador

Microsoft is the leading platform and productivity company in the modern cloud-driven landscape. They developed a vast partner channel known as the Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) for better reach to their customers throughout the world. To promote partner engagement in the MPN program, Microsoft awards successful partners with competency achievements to better connect with their customers by promoting their Microsoft-endorsed status.

Working closely with the MPN IT team to integrate with their existing partner database, the challenge was to create a system that limits the distribution of custom logos to the partner organizations that earned each achievement, while making logo customization simple for users. We developed an application with a fluid UX design allowing users to create logos that fit their partner profile, integrating the current MPN branding, and adopting leading edge technology by pushing the partner program into the Microsoft Azure Cloud.

The result was a streamlined user experience that was fully responsive, with a flexible architecture that could adapt to changing requirements over time.

As one of the premier global mobile brands, Samsung needs to constantly perform research and development on new consumer experiences. With resource constraints in the Seattle metropolitan area, Samsung had very specific and high-level talent and technical needs that required a partner with a very deep and diverse skill set. By providing that talent combined with our in-house mobile and platform development capabilities, we became an integral part of the Samsung research & development team.

The challenge was to quickly assemble a team and fully integrate as an extension of Samsung's Silicon Valley office to meet very tight production timelines.  Our team research and innovated concepts for new apps and technologies, producing high fidelity rapid prototypes for evaluation by Samsung stakeholders. 

As a proven ideation partner, our goal was to produce ideas, with the production of refined concepts defining our success. Our ideas survived the gauntlet of Samsung’s product development process and went on to produce consumer products.

Rudeen & Associates, an information systems consulting firm, was working on a prototype for rebuilding the Home page for RCO’s PRISM, a web application for managing project grants. In developing this prototype and reviewing it with their client and users, they discovered a number of usability issues in the application home page. They looked to our design team’s user experience expertise to come up with solutions to solve these issues.

On a tight timeline, the challenge was to redesign the PRISM home page experience to address the usability pain points caused by trying to satisfy both user types on the same screen. After analyzing each user type’s, we customized the experience for each user group, creating one screen with quick actions for infrequent users and a separate screen for power users’ extensive data search and filtering.

FlightSafety International provides professional aviation training including flight simulation training on a variety of aircraft. Needing to revamp and expand several of their internal applications for managing training document subscriptions, they were looking to improve administrative efficiency. They also wanted to create new customer facing applications to provide a richer training experience for students.

The challenge was to design and develop a suite of applications with a consistent look and feel for managing a wide array of business functions, from document distribution to information management to performance tracking. Palador built a new subscription platform using a hybrid model of technologies for data synced across applications and a distributed service-based architecture, with a new design system for a cohesive user experience. We developed a new design system with a flexible interface template for use on both native iPad applications and responsive web apps that ensured a consistent experience across applications. As technology evolves, it can be difficult to introduce new concepts into an established environment. By introducing a more distributed service architecture that could be consumed by any new FlightSafety application, we were able to integrate our new application platform within the existing environment to provide a seamless experience for the end user.

Additionally, we designed and built an interactive dashboard employing a comprehensive data warehouse for continuous evaluation of each center and program. We provided a solution that not only looked visually stunning, it gave the FlightSafety management team new information all in one simple tool.

As an elite engineering, surveying and planning company in the Pacific Northwest, LDC had been sending clients and recruits to their current website since 2010. The site was built in static HTML and only updatable by their tech team. It no longer met the high standards of the company, and was detracting from the firm's reputation for quality in the region and across their industry among clients and prospective employees.

LDC needed an easy-to-manage site and a modernized brand that conveyed the high quality of their work and reflected the culture of the company for clients and recruits. To address this challenge, we completed a site redesign based on a comprehensive user-focused design process, moving LDC's site from a backend managed in HTML to an easy-to-manage Wordpress CMS.

The result of the project was a client and recruit friendly website. LDC's views on Glassdoor increased 118% in the first six months after the redesign. During the same period, visits to the site increased 200% over their previous site. The site provides a consistent brand and design platform that LDC has been able to expand beyond the site.

Marcus & Millichap is a large commercial real estate investment firm in the US and Canada. They were in need of a tool, integrated into their intranet, for managing their real estate loans. Their current tool for doing this was clunky, slow, and had an interface inconsistent with other tools employees were used to using, making it less familiar and confusing.

The challenge was to design and develop an application for efficiently managing real estate loans, ensuring integration with their existing data, security and interface design, without disrupting their current database schema tied to existing reports and processes. We familiarized ourselves with their processes, user roles, and data structures, while using newer technologies such as SQL Server Reporting Services and client side JavaScript MVC frameworks, to create a logical, organized, fast, and user-friendly tool. We became experts in Marcus & Millichap’s loan approval process, analyzing documentation of their highly complex business rules, and meeting frequently with their IT team and loan administrators to capture the nuance needed within the application workflow. We created innovative processes and data relationships while maintaining the existing data structure for backwards compatibility.

Our team developed a seamless UI that captured the system complexity simply across multiple interfaces and devices. We optimized for performance, using an MVC based architecture with knockout.js, raising the bar for internal application standards at the company. Our team integrated with multiple existing data sources and applications for enterprise wide integration of this complex application. We also simplified and migrated reporting into SQL Server Reporting Services to align with the rest of their reporting infrastructure and current technologies so that data and reporting could sync across the company.

Palador was selected to conduct a proof of concept (POC) on King County’s Property Tax Assessment System. The county’s current property tax system is inefficient and is unable to keep up with changes to state laws. King County is also rapidly expanding and the number of parcels to be administered and assessed for property taxes has doubled. The county has considered replacing their property tax system for several years but has found that most of the vendors that provide off the shelf property tax assessment systems are too costly. Palador was chosen to determine if using Microsoft Dynamics Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution could replace the current tax assessment system at a lower cost.

The Dynamics platform has never been customized to provide a complete property tax assessment system for any county in the US. The challenge was to determine whether it was possible, how it could be done, and what the user experience would be.

Palador, working closely with experts in Dynamics customization and GIS, managed a team that developed the user flows, interaction flows, wireframes and high fidelity mockups, and conducted analysis that resulted in finalized requirements for development of the full Dynamics solution. The POC was successful and project findings showed the County could save $10 million dollars using the Dynamics platform vs maintaining the current solution or purchasing an off the shelf option.