"It's like Spotify, but for spreadsheets and reports!"
Behold, the pitch I was given when joining up with the rest of team responsible for helping build Chevron Canada Ltd. a functional file-sharing platform for their rich international business.
Okay, it's not as fun as listening to your favourite playlist on Spotify. But... if you're really into data files and spreadsheets... and enjoy having them organized into easily accessible collections and categories... all within a sleek and stylish UI designed by yours truly... then it's totally your jam. Take my word for it.
A majority of the product's wireframes and flows had already been completed by my talented co-worker Tiffany by the time I hopped on board. Incredibly, she somehow found time to do this when she wasn't busy stealing things from my desk and hiding them around the office. And truly, I mean it when I say this, she did an amazing job on both.
Ultimately, for me this meant finding my whiteboard markers for the eighteenth time, and then jumping in with both feet to a fast-moving project in progress. Much like cramming the night before for a final exam (... not that I've ever done that), I rapidly studied everything from the project documentation to flows, and joined in prototyping user flows and features.
Sometimes it can really feel like all UX and no UI. This project however felt a little special in that although I certainly contributed to the UX side of things, I was able to spend a larger-than-usual proportion of time on the visual design of the interface. That's just luxurious. What can I say, I really like aligning everything perfectly to grids, tinkering with font sizes, line-heights, corner radii, and unnecessarily designing vector icons from scratch. It's the little things, really.
In the end we delivered an awesome project, within scope, on budget and on time. I created flows for multiple features and supervised their implementation, and made some clean, accessible and responsive UI designs that look good from mobile to desktop. Dare I say the last time file sharing was this fun you were downloading a Metallica album on Napster. Heck, I even found my stapler. Eventually.
