if you can't make it simple, it better make sense.
the problem:
Seeq is a web-based desktop app for process manufacturing industries to visualize and analyze their data. From industries like pharmaceuticals and beverages, to oil and electricity, the breadth of the tool's application was enormous, and the calculations a user needed to be able to do on their data were often staggering in their complexity. The potential for Seeq to lessen the time and effort required by the engineers -literally from months in Excel to a few hours in Seeq- was hampered only by the complexity of the tool and the frustrations of its users.
When I joined the company, the tool was already on its third version and running into difficulties of feature expansion. The design was minimal, but the scope and vision for what it could be was impressive. It was my job to design a usable, bigger structure for the program so that new tools and functionality could be tucked away without crowding each other; and also to support their marketing department in making several dozen instructional videos, ads, banners, t-shirt designs, and anything else they needed a designer to troubleshoot.
When I joined the company, the tool was already on its third version and running into difficulties of feature expansion. The design was minimal, but the scope and vision for what it could be was impressive. It was my job to design a usable, bigger structure for the program so that new tools and functionality could be tucked away without crowding each other; and also to support their marketing department in making several dozen instructional videos, ads, banners, t-shirt designs, and anything else they needed a designer to troubleshoot.
The approach:
I mentioned earlier that I think of UX design as architecture. Both buildings and digital products are built to sustain only a certain amount of stress. Seeq was built like a family home, only able to support a small number of functions and users before it started bursting at the seams. What the tool needed to be was like a federal building: well-organized, efficient, useful at small scales and large ones alike, able to withstand the tests of hard, regular usage and an older user base of engineers whose only concern was getting shit done.
So, along with the very talented dev team and well-informed analytical engineers of the company, I set out to help them build just that.
So, along with the very talented dev team and well-informed analytical engineers of the company, I set out to help them build just that.
Rigorous tools should bend, not break. First things first was the menu system and organization of functionality within the tool. As many of the tools were complex algorithms that would need to be applied to any kind of process data in any industry, we needed to generalize and classify each of them into logical categories. Once this was done, I created a system of adding any kind of category to their menu system, under which could be an organized set of related algorithmic tools. |
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The bigger the tool, the farther back you need to step.
From the get-go, I had concerns about the long-term organizational structure and functional visualizations in Seeq. Users would be expecting to organize and share their work. How could we support that? And the data viz was going to get very complicated- what was an elegant solution to handling that?
Within the first six months of working with Seeq, I was making mockups that the company didn't use until a year and a half, two years, down the line.
Devil's in the redlines. Like I mention in my design process, I don't consider interface design a separate part of my UX work. Visual design is as vital a component to the experience of a product as is good user research. Working as the only designer with a large team of talented, fast-working developers, I had to quickly turn around large numbers of icons, redlines, and mockups. |
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A vision is more than just a business proposal. It's an animated video to tell to your clients what you do. It's web advertisements and magazine infographics to reach new customers. And it's also t-shirt designs and new-release stickers to bring together team morale. It's a story of who the company is as a whole. |
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All work is copyrighted Seeq Inc.