Situation

When I joined CleverMaps, the product was still at its later stage of conception, quite unbaked and immature. It was being built on the go mainly by developers, GIS professionals and inputs from sales. The interface, user flows and analytical capabilities were prevalently based on highly specific clients' — not actual users' — needs.

The product suffered from a good deal of serious usability, consistency, discoverability and other issues. The interaction costs were massive due to the massive information overload. It was trying to provide advanced spatial analysis while omitting some very fundamental functionalities. Only a handful of people outside our team could successfully navigate the product or dig some deeper meaning from it. The friction was too high and the gap between the information on the screen and the end user was too deep.

Designing for an emerging new field was a challenging task. If CleverMaps was to be successful, the product had to be rethinked ground up on a conceptual level. I had set four main baseline rules, that became the new foundation.

Product

CleverMaps is a location intelligence B2B tool allowing users to visualize data, analyse spatial contexts and explore patterns that are otherwise invisible in regular charts and tables.

My role

Being the only full-time designer in the company (2015 to 2020), I was responsible for the entire design process from user research to feature releases. I have touched every aspect of the product from defining the visual language to simplifying user flows.