Product Designer
Software built internally by Verys to manage their own agile software business. After 3 years of development we were ready to transform Nostra into a marketable SaaS product for small to mid-sized professional services business.
Product
Desktop web application designed for managers to plan projects and forecast the business. iOS/Android mobile app designed for employees to track time.
Team Composition
VP of Product
Senior UX Designer
Lead Software Engineer
Software Engineers
My Role
Led design in a cross-functional team working to ship startup resource allocation and forecasting product to professional services companies.
User Experience
Manage companies, projects, roles, and the employees that track time to roles. Forecast your business based on planned allocation versus actual tracked time of employees on projects.
Nostra needed site reorganization, a new brand, and a vision for the future with an enhanced experience. The APIs powering the system were robust, but the interface and experience of using the product had huge potential for improvement.
After team discussions about future features and high-level direction of where the product could go, I distilled the highest impact ideas into interactive prototype concept. This concept lead to redesigning other screens with the same style to see how the application could feel holistically.
Since the interface was built from a React Material Design library we decided to structure our new design system in the same way to more easily map changes from old to new. After these global changes we would focus on the highest impact, most used pages first.
Building a tool to run your own business has the benefit of direct access to your users (aka. coworkers). Interviews and open channels of communication with our users helped us understand major painpoints. Weekly meetings are held where the Nostra is screenshared offering behavioral insights into how it’s used through observation.
New features and ongoing refinements were designed in Figma and demoed to users before development to gather feedback. Once developed and in use, new feedback was gathered to further refine based on our previous iterations and assumptions.
Nostra was entering a level of polish and usability where it was ready to start acquiring customers. Based on feedback from sales people and customers new features and enhancements were designed to help win deals.