Mitrend is a data analytics company that helps businesses understand and organize their big data. I served as their principal designer and creative director and built the user experience and design system from the ground up.

Prompt

Objective ― Make a brand, SaaS platform, and deliverables for a data analytics company.

My Role ― First creative hire. Build out the team and design practices and process.

Challenge ― Creating brand and identity, user experience design, user interface design, and design systems.

Result

Deliverables ― Brand guidelines, SaaS platform with better UX, infographic deliverables.

Conclusion ― My seven years at Mitrend were a great learning experience and a perfect place to hone my skills and prepare me for leading teams for other projects.

Note: Some copy and data is blurred and anonymized for legal reasons.

The Brand ―

When I arrived at Mitrend there were no creatives. No designers. No UX experts. It was a group of developers and programmers who were using a single form to allow users to upload log files that they have pulled off of their hardware via terminal script or hardware specific process. Then our backend would do magic and email a powerpoint report full of tables and spreadsheets in the default powerpoint style.

Step one for me was to give Mitrend a brand and identity so we could begin to make headway as a brand and company. While the company uses an agile process for development cycles, the newly formed (and growing) creative team was allowed time to research our competitors, brainstorm, and refine our logo, typography, and colors. After decisions were made with regards to brand and identity, we began to build out a branding style guide with an eye towards our next project, the platform.

User Experience ―

One of the major issues with the user experience was that there was no platform. They uploaded a file and attached an email address to send the results to. No viewing old reports, no way to resend it without contacting support, no way to log in and adjust preferences, settings, or manage data. The first major rework of the user experience was adding a logged in section, historical upload data, and an ability to export and interact with reports online.

Pictured above is one of our wireframes and user flows for our online platform. When we gave users the ability to log in and explore their data, we also had to add other pages that allowed them to download our data gathering tool, view and export their old reports, and upload new data with varying levels of features and support depending on the type of account.

Style Guides ―

While creating the web portal and the software for collecting data, we made sure that our branding principles were followed to create a unified and seamless flow between apps, platforms, and reports. Keeping a uniform look across products is paramount to keeping a clean and recognizable brand.

UI Design ―

In addition to creating the user stories and flows through our products, my team was responsible for designing all the UI elements that were used across our products. While many of them can be easily pulled from the style guide when the developers need them, there were also custom elements for a few solutions that we created and support the developers during their agile sprints to ensure they implemented them correctly.

Software ―

Our data collection software was a downloadable file to run against your storage or backup arrays that would allow users to automatically upload your results to our platform or to get a simple report without having any contact with our online system. It walked you through scans of many different types of systems and had the potential to merge data from a few different sources as well.

Infographics & Reports ―

When I joined Mitrend we were giving out powerpoints with default style as a report. Some of our customers would screenshot it and put it into their own deck to present to others, so when we updated to our own style, we wanted to keep it relatively neutral so that regardless of our customers' brand, our content would not seem out of place. We offered our infographics in both pdf and slide format, both available as a download from our web platform.

Our web platform also offered extra exploratory tools for our users to pivot data around in custom tables and charts as well as providing sizing, cost, and efficiency projections for potential solutions to any problems that our data analysis discovered.

Note: All data and information shown here has been blurred or sanitized for legal and confidentiality reasons.

Results ―

Our SaaS platform included a file scanning desktop application, a web portal to organize and interact with the data gathered, interactive reports, branded powerpoints, and other custom reporting material for our users.

Our SaaS platform has over 10k+ users including multiple fortune 50 companies and drove $5b+ in revenue for our users.