The team at ContentSavvy first approached me looking for someone to simply design the look & feel of their ContentSeer™ platform, an important SaaS solution which allows for the processing of multiple data sources (news, social media, enterprise data) and provides analytics to organizations in order to identify trends and customer sentiment, amongst other things. Their platform was already in a semi-working order (at least on the backend). But after some initial calls and email exchanges to see what I was working with, it was clear that they weren’t as far along as they initially thought.

They did have a few key screens that were wireframed, but they lacked detail and weren’t fully thought out in terms of the interactions, user flow, or efficient use of screen real estate. Plus, once I put myself in the users’ shoes and did a walkthrough, there were still lots of unanswered questions and problem areas. They decided to heed my advice and start with a clean slate, and focus on making the application work well before taking on the visual design (I don’t care how pretty an application looks; if it doesn’t work well or doesn’t meet the users’ goals, it’s a wasted effort).

The vast amounts of data being pulled from this platform meant that we needed a more intuitive multi-faceted search paradigm, with the ability to compare between multiple documents and sources. And based on the business and user goals, I also recommended new features such as the ability to save documents into Projects, exporting and printing reports, being able to add shared Notes to specific documents for later retrieval, and interactive graphs and charts.

Another unique challenge, which is also what makes this product different than its competitors, was that it could handle data from multiple languages. I needed to keep this in mind since the design had to not only accommodate much longer words, but also different characters altogether.

Once we were in a good spot with the user experience, I got to work on the visual design. Using colors from their existing brand (red, blue, gray), I created an engaging design that was modern and crisp but at the same time very utilitarian, allowing for the data to be front and center.