Slide UX

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our first project was designing a new editorial destination. They came in and facilitated a group of our editorial team, our digital team, and a number of our content producers. Through that, they got a firsthand feel for the vision and the existing materials we had.

We then entered into a timebox design period. We workshopped around the vision and the design team turned around a number of prototypes of concepts. They built in a couple of rounds of iteration, using the first round to push the boundaries a little bit. Ultimately, we made our way towards a final design and, once we had that, they assisted us in selecting who we should partner with to build it.

We planned the detailed implementation of the new editorial site. Slide UX built the detailed design and all the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and asset development that we needed for the site, while the other agency built the backend components of that. We’ve redesigned and rebuilt almost our entire website. We’ve backed into redesigning a lot of the core site, giving it an overhaul both visually and from a usability standpoint.

We were then able to use that as a launch point into some subsequent projects, including a large one that all three of us worked on together. We also did a couple sequential projects and now they are our agency record for interaction design.

What is the team composition?

We have worked with about four different people. Their creative director, Chad took point on the visioning and concept and guided it through the various stages of development. Another designer, Jeff, was involved from the creative and visual design standpoint. Samantha [User Experience Researcher, Slide UX] was our content strategist. She had a really challenging job of working with us to figure out how the design could support some of the content and interactions from an editing and design standpoint. Hannah was our project manager who kept on top of how much time we were spending on things and made sure we met our deadline.

How did you come to work with Slide UX?

I had some experience working with them in other organizations, which is what led me back to them.

I wanted to bring in Slide UX because I knew their approach to building things. It involved spending time gaining a deep understanding of the problem space: what the goals were, building something that supported the goals, and ensuring it had a visual identity. We turned our attention to them and they were differentiated for us by their approach.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in August 2017 and the work is ongoing.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We work with Slide UX on a continuous basis. Their first task was designing our mobile app which we issued to our first beta customer. After working on that for a few months, they started designing our corporate website which they're continuing to improve. They've also been building broker tools that will be available on a backend portal behind the site’s login.

Slide UX has assisted with virtually everything we've done since we started this company. They focus on design, while our internal development team executes the implementation. The designers also created finished products for the initial version of our website. It was hosted on WordPress, and they picked out the theme and templates. On occasion, we've provided wireframes for the design. The founder Erin Young improves our concepts from a UI and design perspective. We collaboratively flesh out ideas to the point where she can start creating new designs and mockups.

What is the team composition?

Erin Young is our primary point of contact and we’ve worked with three additional resources. A WordPress expert handled the site and themes. Two supplemental designers have helped efficiently complete a high volume of work at times.

How did you come to work with Slide UX?

I've worked with several local and national design firms during my 25 years in Austin’s software business. We considered a few companies before contacting Slide UX. We wanted a design firm to work with us on a consistent basis. Several vendors were only willing to execute a finite project, which ruled out several options. Other firms have a laborious design process that we found prohibitive. We needed a flexible provider who was open to different methods. During our consideration process, we assessed their previous design work and ability to communicate ideas.

How much have you invested with them?

We pay Slide UX a monthly average of $10,000. In total, we've spent over $70,000 on their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together around August of 2017 and our engagement is ongoing. We always have projects for them to complete.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We started with initial discovery. We were building out a new integration platform as a service that was our focus for the year. We weren’t sure how to tackle that objective from a UX perspective, so we brought in Slide UX fairly early to provide an integration platform as a service to our users. They were part of several of our design and requirement conversations, and they started building out wireframes and designs based on our discussions.

Over the past nine months, our requirements and delivery goals have constantly changed. Slide UX is flexible in making those changes and requirements. We’re still providing an integration platform as a service, but we’re more focused on a specific piece of that now: providing data-integration management tools versus all the other types of integrations that we offer. They’re working with us to navigate the requirements for that piece and strategizing how we can provide an intuitive experience for our integration customers.

We always had user research in the plans with Slide UX. Throughout the past nine months, they’ve done a lot of design work and wireframes for us. User research is the last thing that gets cut from our requirements, but more recently Slide UX did some basic surveys of our users. They put together a survey with about 30 questions, sent it out, and are in the process of analyzing that data to see what path we should take with some of the features of our product.

Early in the process, they provided a prototype of some of the designs they did. They’re constantly giving us updated design artifacts. I’m able to play with them and iterate over some of those designs. They’ve also put together a style guide to promote consistency for our development team as they’re creating the UI.

What is the team dynamic?

We’ve worked with probably five people, but we are consistently working with Erin [Founder & User Experience Architect, Slide UX] and Megan [UX Researcher, Slide UX]. They’ve brought in a few people with more experience or a specialty in certain areas. For example, when we were working on digital design concepts, they brought in somebody who specialized in putting together visual designs. When we were doing the survey, they brought in someone who specialized in user research and survey writing.

How did you come to work with Slide UX?

We’d worked with Slide UX for another project about three years ago. I’m not sure how they were discovered for that project. We liked working together, so we approached them again for this bigger project. They had the background knowledge from the previous project, so they didn’t have to learn many concepts. Personality-wise, they’re an ideal fit for our company.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent $100,000–$200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in December 2016, and our collaboration is ongoing. 

What was the scope of their involvement?

Slide UX helped us through the process with surveying existing customers, prospects in the industry, even people outside the industry. We somewhat predicted the response regarding the name You’ve Got Leads, or YGL as most users refer to it as. The response was overwhelming that we should keep the name. Based on that feedback, we moved forward with basically a refresh rather than a complete rebrand. We needed to come up with a great logo.

The progression was initially understanding more about what You’ve Got Leads is and who we are in this industry and who our audience is. What does the user look like that uses You’ve Got Leads on a day to day basis? Slide UX put together a full presentation of that and wrote it up in a section as if they were the marketer which was awesome. They shared that with us to make sure that we knew that they knew exactly the challenges our users face and why You’ve Got Leads is so valuable and critical.

In between the actual work and coming up with iterations of a new logo, we also did the surveys and everything else and they helped with that and they wrote surveys for us and just helped us every step of the way through that process and analyzing the results. Then we got into the refresh of the logo. We went through several rounds of logos and gave them feedback. We narrowed it down from five different categories with at least seven or ten logos in each category to one category that we really liked. Then we took a couple of logos from that category and narrowed that down further. All this time they’re just giving us more iterations of the logo with color and so on. That whole process was great and very collaborative. I love our logo. It’s incredible. It’s so much better now and people have nothing but positive things to say about it. It is incredibly versatile. I’ve been around this industry for a while and know how easy it is to mess that up.

After the first project was completed, we went back to them for another project. I know they’re a full-service marketing firm. It seems like they’re good at everything. We wanted to redo the user-experience, user-interface, what the actual pages looked like. This was an awesome experience for us because truth be told, we really hadn’t had a professional look at You’ve Got Leads as far as the screens themselves and what the user experiences when they click on something or the look in the field. We hadn’t ever had a full on UI professional take a look and mock up the sections and pages. In the beginning, there were some programmers that redid some pages, but this was the first time someone helped us with optimization. They know what users respond to, and they helped us with our dashboard and optimizing it for a mobile site. They also helped on optimizing the other main sections for leads and lead tracking in the program which includes the activities page for the lead and also the master record for a lead and lead search. When you log into our program and you have 1,000 leads, what does the page look like where you have to filter down and search for people that you’re looking for? They helped us specifically with the mobile dashboard, the desktop dashboard, the lead search page, and the activities page for a lead.

We had at least four or five resources from Slide UX dedicated to different areas of our projects. Erin [Young, Founder] and Lindsay [Winters, Interactive & User Design] were there every call, and there were others as well. Chad [Currie, Creative Director] was the head designer.

How did you come to work with Slide UX?

My boss and another senior VP knows Slide UX. We have offices in Austin, Texas, where they are located. They worked with other divisions of A Place for Mom and some projects that we’re working on for the homecare industry. We usually reach out to them to submit a quote for these types of smaller jobs and other things.

How much have you invested with Slide UX?

We spent between $15,000 and $20,000 over the course of our relationship.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working with them in the summer of 2015. The UI project was in the first quarter of 2017. All of our projects have been completed. We are now doing the coding of the pages ourselves.