Anaqua Container
One of the many projects I worked on at Anaqua that I was able to take from concept, to wireframes, to visual was the "Container." The Container concept came about because our users needed a place where they could store everything they were doing in their day to day. Our users are in the Anaqua software for 8 hours a day, but they also refer to external links, reports, documents, etc. The Container was a place where our users could store links to all of these things in one dashboard. The conception of the "Containers" was pretty simple. We'd been hearing from users for months that, "It would be great if we could collect everything we do in your software in one centralized location." So we gave it to them.
I started by sitting down with our visual designer and brainstorming what this "thing" could look like. What are the requirements? Why is it important? We turned to the whiteboard, and began crafting blue sky designs. Initially, like every project at Anaqua, we include our developers very early on in the design process because they keep us grounded. The code stack is very limiting for the Anaqua software, so the majority of our first pass designs (while efficient and helpful for the user) have to be boiled down in order to be supported by the code stack. Sucks right? Our ideal scenario would have been to give the users the content they were looking for right here on the page. Instead of having links that sent users off to the pages they needed, it would have been a much better experience to surface that content upfront. Alas, our code base could not support that, so after many heated discussions, I settled on this visual representation (see below). The entire experience is referred to as "Containers" and the interior content blocks are called "tiles."
The top part (where you see the peoples faces) is a text editor WYSIWYG. I wanted to give users the ability to put anything in this area so they felt like it was their own dashboard. We suggested putting notes to the team, pictures of team members, goals for the month, etc. We incorporated a little bit of color recognition in this design, with the blue and green tiles. The green tiles take the user to our competitive analysis software, "Acclaim" and the blue tiles are our generic base tiles. It was important to me to call the Acclaim tiles out because clicking these links takes our users out of their expereince, and sends them over to our Acclaim software which is not fully integrated yet.
I started off brainstorming with our internal stakeholders to define requirements
A huge part of my design process is note taking to understand requirements and start to brainstorm.
More brainstorm notes and requirements gathering with my VP of Product
More brainstorm notes and requirements gathering with my VP of Product
This was one of our biggest containers, for our users who needed to analyze portfolio's and examine competition. The green tiles note that this content sends the user over to our competitive analysis tool called "Acclaim." there, our users can examine their portfolios and see how the measure up to the competition. As you can see in the top WYSIWYG area, not every client will want pictures of their team. I provided a container design with just text and icons, laid out in a visually appealing way. This is all a suggestion for our users.
Another container that would be heavily used is the "Task Management" container. This is a container where our users can organize tasks. In the above example, our user is working with trademarks, and may need to lookup a TM application, or a specific mark. They may then need to look at a report to see how their TM's are doing competitively. Internal Resources and Outside Council Collaboration provide links to document workspace's we have within Anaqua.
Another container, the "Business Director" persona would be using. This user would want to look at reports, refer to several documents, and look at competitive analysis (the green tiles).
The Intake container was created for the docketing and paralegal persona, depending on how big the law firm was. This user is creating things in Anaqua all day long. Patents, Meetings, Organizations, Contacts, and more. It is this users job to make sure all new clients are ported into Anaqua. It's a rough job but someone's got to do it!
This container is targeted to the docketing persona. This user is creating inventions, checking on invention statuses, managing patents, and much more. This container provides resources for all they need to do in their day