PROJECT OVERVIEW
CLIENT
Applixya
MY ROLE
Design Lead, via Plexable
SCOPE
User stories, wireframes for every screen, two visual rounds and 67 final screens for iPad and web.
VALIDATION
No test data survives from 2014. The reading rooms screen can still be checked against its own wireframe, and the layout holds from August to September.
TIMELINE
February 2014 to September 2014
TEAM
Delivered through Plexable with the Applixya team
The context
Applixya builds secure iPad software for officials and executives, with clients in Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
IX Office had to hold shared rooms of documents, personal shelves, news boards and discussions, and stay easy to use away from the office, on an iPad or at a desk.
My responsibility
Work began on the board in February 2014, and the design ran from there to finished screens in September.
I decided how the product looked and behaved. The boards, the user stories and the wireframe map were made with the Applixya team.
Ten components across two platforms came to 67 screens, and 67 screens drift unless the decisions are written as rules.
Most of the effort went into settling what a card shows, what a dialog asks and what a date says.
CONSTRAINTS & TRADE-OFFS
The people using this were officials and executives, reading documents between meetings rather than learning software. Every screen had to be obvious the first time it opened.
That ruled out hidden menus and clever gestures, and it pushed the file count, the New badge and the view switch into plain sight.
● RESEARCH & CONTEXT
Where the open questions were
Research here meant pulling what Applixya already knew about officials and executives onto a whiteboard, module by module.
Two questions had no written answer yet: who gets to see a reading room, and how a date should read on a card.
● PRODUCT DECISIONS
Sharing and the clock
A reading room is shared with chosen people, while the library belongs to one person and is never shared.
Dates show the month and day, and anything newer than 24 hours reads as hours ago.
● PRODUCT ARCHITECTURE
How the workspace is stacked
On the iPad the modules are reached from a tab bar and from a blue side menu, and the web app opens the same set.
Below that the nesting never changes: a room holds shelves, a shelf holds files, and each card carries its file count.
● PROCESS & EVIDENCE
Every whiteboard was photographed and sorted by component before a single word of the stories was written.
Rules then travelled as notes beside the screens: how a date reads, and what a delete takes with it.
OUTCOMES
What Applixya had in September
Applixya ended September 2014 with both products designed and the reasoning behind them written down.
Both held the full set of components, so neither one was the cut-down version of the other.
2
Platforms
An iPad app for the meeting room and a web app for the desk.
67
Final screens
Thirty two for the iPad and thirty five for the web, finished in September 2014.
10
Components sketched
Meetings, minutes, tasks, correspondence, contacts, the schedule, comments, news, reading rooms and the library.
WHAT I’D IMPROVE
What I would change
A round of testing with real executives belongs between the wireframe map and the visual work, not after it.
The August and September palettes could have been shown as two options side by side instead of one after the other.
WHAT I LEARNED
What stayed with me
Rules written next to the screens, like how dates read and what a delete removes, travel better than rules kept in a designer's head.
A palette earns its keep when each color has one job: green adds, coral deletes, blue navigates.
More work
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