Relationship Science

Role

Product Manager and Designer

Medium

Web based and iOS applications

Employment Type

Full Time Employee

Duration

3 years

The relationship capital platform. Reach the people who will have the greatest impact on your organization's success.

The Problem:

Relationship Science, or RelSci for short, is a business development tool that provides in-depth information about influential people - who they are and whom they know, what you have in common with them, and most importantly, how you can gain access to them and their organizations. This project aimed to redesign our iPhone application to increase ease of use and the adoption rate, but many projects were competing for limited resources, and our mobile experience was secondary to the web. The inspiration came when I took over as mobile team lead and wanted to make our mobile applications a more relevant part of the business and easier to use.

The Process:

As I always do, I started with research. This included querying usage stats for our two most recent iPhone and iPad versions, compiling a spreadsheet of all the bugs and enhancements in our bug-tracking system, talking to various client service representatives and account managers, and, finally, looking into current design trends to figure out what we were not doing. After analyzing and synthesizing all the data into a spreadsheet/document, I reviewed my findings with the team to elicit their feedback. We came up with a list of enhancements, as shown in image 2 below, after a couple of brainstorming sessions and competitive analysis. The market segments that most heavily used our mobile application and would benefit from the redesign were Private Equity and Hedge Funds, Investment Banks, Non-profit Organizations, and Consulting Firms. After careful consideration and research into all of our users in these market segments, we determined that our most prominent users were importing their contacts via the mobile application, traveling for work, executives, sales managers, and fund managers. I used this information to create user workflows and basic wireframes. Then I reviewed them with the mobile team and a few account managers. The final step was several iterations, design reviews, feedback, and analysis.

The Conclusion:

Upon completion of the project, along with the appropriate workflows and business logic, we created the following designs and more:

The application’s landing page allowed users to sign in, request a new password, or log in via the Single Sign-On (SSO) protocol.
The search results page allows users to switch between people and organization results, as well as see preliminary information on their results.
Search page with filter panel activated. Allows the user to perform more specific searches based on criteria other than names.
My Account page allows users to view and import their relationships, view their reports, manage lists, access their settings, and log out.