Platform Design

We created a post-run experience for Prudential's 4.01K run.

Prudential 4.01K

The Google Impact Challenge asks local nonprofit innovators how they would make their community an even better place.

Google.org runs several Impact Challenges every year in different communities across the globe. Each one attracts hundreds—or thousands—of entries from nonprofits of all sizes and of all stages. Each entry needs to then be vetted, reviewed, and scored by a group of subject-matter experts for quality, relevance, feasibility, and several other factors. We worked with Google.org to build a platform that allows them to create new Challenges, accept submissions, and vet entries with experts.

The Google.org team wanted to reduce the overhead of spinning up challenges and reviewing entries.

We worked closely with the Google.org team to understand their process and design a platform that could automate and coordinate the tasks that they were doing manually or with less-than-ideal tools.

We then set out to design a tool that addressed all of these concerns, while providing a concise experience that hides all of this complexity from applicants. The platform we built is designed to allow completely flexible application form creation, giving the Impact Challenge team the ability to accept short-form, long-form, multi-select, and many other response types, as well as configure Challenge availability, automated responses, and complete reviews.

Easy-to-use UI to support any arrangement of questions and inputs

Quick, automated reviewer assignment based on experience

Interface for submissions on mobile and tablet devices

Lead Developer

Google.org has used this platform to accept thousands of applications from all over the world, from Germany to Nigeria to Australia. The easy review process has allowed them to scale these challenges greatly.

Platform

We built a platform to help nonprofits apply for funding from Google.org.

Google Impact Challenge

The leading engineering design software company was at an inflection point: new branding, new name, big new product release. Their website was a key sales conduit. We helped reinvent it.

nTop takes a unique generative-first approach to the manufacturing design process, enabling product designers and manufacturers to produce more effective, more efficient parts with their CAD software offering. While nTop’s website served them well through their first several years of operation, the marketing team’s sophisticated growth plans and increasingly fierce competition, and a new brand meant that it was time to level up their digital marketing.

Redesigning the website served multiple purposes: build customer-first, story-driven case studies and improve sales and search performance.

Our team pursued a plan of action to accomplish all three while simplifying the content operations and allowing the marketing team more flexibility to create the content they needed to connect with customers.

The website was relaunched successfully in April 2023, shortly before the RAPID + TCT conference, allowing nTop to unveil its full rebrand at the conference. Over the course of the following year, the new site architecture allowed search impressions to double.

nTop’s brief to us was simple: reinvent their website to solidify their position as the

They wanted to create a striking new website that brought the new brand to life, accelerated digital marketing, improved conversions, and provided their team a site that would be as agile as their growth and marketing teams.

We began with two parallel explorations: new, differentiated directions for the homepage that adopted the new branding and introduced new creative directions, and a plan for the information architecture to divide the system into modular elements.

With an offering that supported a wide range of use cases and a broad spectrum of potential customers, we had to develop a modular system that allowed nTop to easily modify and scale their content with minimal development overhead.

We designed a solution that provided the team with the flexibility to curate each page using a modular content system backed by Sanity’s headless content management system. This approach allows the team to focus on generating new sales opportunities while retaining a seamless, unified brand experience.

Each section of the website was designed to be highly customizable, allowing for the stacking and nesting of elements to create unique page layouts.

After reaching alignment with the client on the information architecture, customer personas, and wireframes, we moved into high-fidelity design. As the system was modular, we used this as an opportunity to explore a few unique design elements within a few key components.

These elements helped provide some standout visuals and moments that help engage prospective customers, while giving the marketing team reusable components that can be adapted at will.

The website was developed through our process of rapid, iterative sprints that allow for parallel design refinement, hands-on client reviews, and progressive enhancement. Next.js allowed our team to rapidly develop each core component to spec, with respect to accessibility and performance.

Using Sanity and Next.js together, we implemented real-time page previews and on-the-go editing capabilities, enabling the marketing team’s content editors to seamlessly review and collaborate on new sections, pages, and sales materials. The system automatically optimizes the content and images for optimal performance, and using best practices across the Core Web Vitals, we achieved Lighthouse scores of over 90 across the board at launch.

In order to ensure the highest quality search results at launch, and with high Core Web Vitals already in tow, we developed tooling to automatically regenerate sitemaps and implemented structured data markup. From the content-side, we worked closely with the nTop team to ensure that the copy was optimized for their target customers, based on the personas we developed, paired with search data and keyword research.

The site was launched shortly before RAPID + TCT, allowing the nTop team to unveil their new brand and website at the conference.

Thanks to the backing technology and careful information architecture design, we were able to achieve:

A 200% lift in search impressions month-over-month, increasing the site’s competitiveness in for computer-aided design keywords

A 50% reduction in draft-to-live time for the marketing content management team, using a compartmented design system and Sanity live previews

A fully modular website enabling pages to be composed using customizable brand components

Lighthouse scores over 90 across-the-board, ensuring that the customer experience is highly performant, accessible, and search-friendly

Website

We reinvented the website for a leading engineering design software company.

nTop

The Wall Street Journal came to us with a big challenge: build a new product vertical for them, from the ground-up, in just three months. We love a good challenge, and set out to make it happen.

Wall Street Journal’s Buy Side was actively being designed internally as a new vertical for high-quality product recommendations from a storied and trusted source. They needed help from a nimble team of experts that could execute with forward-thinking technology. The goals of the project were actually two-fold: while the primary goal was to launch the new vertical, the secondary goal was to propel the usage of a new tech stack within the organization.

Our team quickly put together a strategic plan of execution to ensure we could meet the aggressive deadline. We pursued development on three separate fronts, which dealt with three separate groups within the organization: the website architecture, the content management system integration, and the analytics implementation. Buy Side launched successfully and on-time in June 2022 to significant fanfare across the organization and the readers of the Journal.

The Wall Street Journal found themselves often making informal product recommendations in the course of their day-to-day news and media content.

Utilizing the trust they’ve earned with their readers, the WSJ team wanted to formalize and build a platform around their recommendations. To do so, they needed to launch a new, standalone vertical within the WSJ.com website, along with an independent product research team.

We began by first drafting an architecture plan based on the designs we were provided by the Wall Street Journal design team.

The object of our initial planning session was to translate the information architecture, as designed, and create a development plan for all pages, layouts, and components our team would need to address.

Once we developed a clear roadmap from design to development, we wanted to identify any efficiencies we could utilize.

To do so, we looked to the WSJ team for any existing elements that we could rely on from within the organization’s existing reusable components libraries, which gave us a healthy head start. From there, we were able to begin developing the building blocks of the site, the base-level components, in isolation.

In parallel, we worked with the WSJ team to identify what data we would need to retrieve from the content management system and began developing the API layer for the frontend.

We developed the website through a series of rapid iterative sprints, progressively bringing us closer to the completed website. Utilizing Next.js, Styled Components, and Storybook, we were able to rapidly develop each core component to spec. Once the core components were developed, we then took the opportunity to adapt or redevelop any of the shared components to fit the needs of the new Buy Side site.

Next.js allowed us to develop a highly performant website within this timeline. Server-side data retrieval from the CMS allowed us to generate fully-rendered pages quickly, with the rendered content being pushed into a cache and rapidly retrieved for multiple visitors. Dynamic client-side integration with authentication, as well as lazy-loaded images, allowed us to keep render and time-to-first-byte overhead low.

After completing the components, we used Next.js’ structure to develop each route and layout, rapidly piecing together each section of the site.

Prove that a Next.js-based platform and architecture was viable and performant for the Wall Street Journal

Enable a wider variety of components and content types, even in this short period of time.

Helped improve the organization’s shared component library and have since continued to expand their available tooling.

Launch on time and on budget to help drive millions of dollars in referral revenue through recommended products.

We developed a new vertical for the storied Wall Street Journal.

Buy Side from WSJ

Sacra is the leading private market research and data provider, providing valuable insights and research that can’t be obtained elsewhere. They worked with Planetary to create a solid and trustworthy platform for their research.

Sacra’s research covers a wide variety of aspects across each organization or market on which it develops reports. The data often includes metrics, graphs, charts, and a full written report. As Sacra began to grow out of the bootstrapped toolkit they used for their initial reports, they turned to us to help design and build their new platform.

The platform needed to cut directly to the chase and get subscribers—investors, private equity, and finance folks who are metrics-focused and time-limited—directly to the critical information they need to make smart decisions. It also needed to make clear the interconnectedness of the data, between different organizations in the same industry, as well as the cross-over between related industries.

We worked with the Sacra team to roll out a new dashboard and platform, with iterative testing, design, and development over the course of 2021 through 2023.

We began by designing Sacra’s pitch deck, which helped them secure their first round of funding.

Planetary was tasked with visualizing these ideas through a newly created brand identity and strategic product guidance. This initial work resulted in the successful raise of a seed financing round, enabling the Sacra idea to be brought to life.

Shortly after closing the seed round, Sacra engaged with our team to design the first version of their web product. We began with a simple content membership experience that would gate research content, offering paying members a detailed editorial view into the companies they profiled. Emphasizing simplicity and Sacra's philosophy of moving quickly and learning from users, we created wireframes and workflows that enabled paying users to access premium research.

After gaining a clear understanding of the information architecture and ideal user journeys, we set out to quickly move from wireframes to high-fidelity designs of each section of the dashboard. Utilizing clickable prototypes, we were able to quickly validate our thinking with the Sacra team, and move into finalizing and developing the experience.

We continued our collaboration with the Sacra team to design interfaces for profiled companies, displaying structured data and basic company information.

We provided varying versions for both members and non-members.

As Sacra continued to flourish, establishing itself as a leading provider of startup analysis, the product evolved in tandem. Long-form articles and Q/As were added, along with a rich interlinking experience that allowed users to locate sources and referring articles. This led to the creation of the web of content referred to as the Sacranet.

The addition of feeds and trending content ensured that users were presented with personalized experiences, receiving the most recent and relevant content. Smart search functionality further empowered users to quickly find the content they were seeking across the ever-expanding library.

We also partnered with the Sacra teams to design newsletters, transactional emails, and PDF exports. This collaboration allowed users to consume Sacra content in various formats that suited them best while maintaining a consistent brand experience.

Planetary’s involvement spanned the entire process, from initial wireframes and workflows to working with the client to refine their product offering through detailed clickable prototypes.

We collaborated closely with both the client's technical teams and our own to implement the designs into responsive, modern web interfaces.

Throughout our involvement with the Sacra team, our work has always been collaborative and iterative. This has afforded us the ability to be responsive to new learnings and changes in the business’ goals, needs, and plans over the course of their growth.

Want to learn more? Get the inside scoop on private markets from 

Product Design and Development

We iteratively designed and developed Sacra's digital platform.

Sacra

Hellosaurus wanted to grow their creator ecosystem and, to do so, needed to rethink their editor experience to be able to attract a wider audience of producers and creatives. They worked with Planetary to redesign the Creator Studio experience.

Our client approached us with a unique challenge: develop an engaging and intuitive editing experience that would not impede the creativity of their diverse user base, ranging from experienced technical creatives at large production studios to eager children aspiring to create their own mini-games.

The first version of the Creator Studio served the early content production well and supported Hellosaurus’ growing library of interactive media. However, to bring it to the larger network of producers, they needed to increase the level of familiarity and ease-of-use producers expect in video production. We worked with the Hellosaurus team to create a holistic design language that would support dozens of types of interactives, a video editing experience, and more.

The new Creator Studio launched in 2022 to positive feedback, and Hellosaurus was acquired by leading edtech software company Brilliant Worldwide at the end of 2022. Brilliant plans to utilize the Creator Studio to produce more interactive lesson content for its 12 million users.

Hellosaurus’ initial Creator Studio experience was a productive “minimum viable product” that allowed the first batch of creators to build interactive content for the platform.

However, the studio lacked the user-friendly interface that a wider audience of producers needed to feel productive, happy, and enthusiastic about the Hellosaurus ecosystem and experience. The core objective of this redesign was to move the Hellosaurus episode editor from a divided Unity & Javascript hybrid experience to a unified, fluid in-app WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) editorial experience.

The unified interface needed to allow producers to work directly within the app that their audience is using, providing a more fluid create-to-publish experience. Unlike the web-only builder of v1, the Hellosaurus team wanted to allow editors to work on friendlier platforms, from desktop (Unity for Windows/Mac) to mobile (built as an iOS app for iPad). Our goal was to design a friendly cross-platform experience.

We began the work by first planning out the immense number of sections, screens, and components that we needed to take into consideration.

As a first step, our team set out to identify the information architecture for the new Creator Studio. This included planning out all “happy path” user flows, as well as the number of 

—what Hellosaurus calls its interactive moments—and the number of controls they would each contain.

In doing this, we could begin to identify common components and shared elements, which we would use to define the design language for the application. It also allowed us to begin identifying any button or view states and edge cases we would need to address in the design.

A “Do It” is an interactive moment in a Hellosaurus experience that allows the player to solve a puzzle, complete a task, or interact with the host. Creators need to be able to drop a Do It into the video and customize it to fit the moment.

We designed a series of components that allowed us to build 14 Do It templates as part of the Creator Studio. Each Do It template has several customization and adjustment options that a creator can apply.

To ensure we had a consistent brand and user experience throughout the Creator Studio, we developed a User Interface Kit.

The elements that we developed for the kit were a reflection of other, familiar user interfaces that producers would regularly be working within, such as Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects.

We used the information architecture and wireframes we developed to identify all the element and component types that would be necessary throughout the application. This list became an extensive array of adjustable components that could be seamlessly integrated, combined, and remixed while remaining consistent. This allowed the Hellosauraus team to easily expand upon what we had created collaboratively and rapidly launch new tools for their users.

Given our client was a rapidly expanding startup, we needed to design the application in a modular manner.

We collaborated with the client to enhance all of their existing "do-its", while ensuring the design patterns could be easily adapted to future versions without major revisions. We took a solution-agnostic approach, focusing on creating a framework rather than a specific tool. This framework underwent rigorous testing against Hellosaurus's defined use cases, and ultimately proved successful when we integrated the various components into a consistent and functional application.

We extensively prototyped, tested, and refined the video editing and creation workflows to ensure that the application was intuitively designed for both scenarios. Simultaneously, we took care to avoid oversimplification that could hinder the experience of power users frequently updating their content library.

The framework's key features included an easy-to-navigate timeline, a highly adaptable form system catering to all types of input, and accessible in-line editing tools for a real-time, on-canvas editing experience in addition to all the standard management and control features that one would expect in a modern web application.

The existing Creator Studio was functional, but lacked the user delight factor and required extensive training for potential users to fully utilize its offerings.

In response, we focused on making the new studio accessible and user-friendly. Our design included in-app guides, intuitive interfaces, and industry-standard workflows that felt natural to both novice and expert users.

Through various iterations, we prototyped and tested the core experience, examining user interaction with the canvas and optimizing the limited viewport space. We designed the video player to act as the creation space, integrating sidebar drawers and in-line action panels that allowed for editing directly on the video for a near real-time WYSIWYG experience. The client's request to ensure the application would also translate well to larger touch devices, such as iPad Pros, added an additional layer of complexity. However, this aligned well with our objective of developing a simple yet powerful editing experience across devices and screen sizes.

Utilizing the modular system and interface kit we developed, we built out a system of user flows that afforded the Hellosaurus team a clear outline for each key use case, and references for future needs as they continued to grow the product.

Videos of the live implementation are courtesy of Hellosaurus.

Product Design

We envisioned a new creator platform for Hellosaurus' digital product.

Hellosaurus Creator Studio

As Higher Ground Schools has evolved and expanded, they wanted their websites to demonstrate this growth. They came to Planetary to help make this happen.

We set out to create a holistic design and development framework for all of their websites, as well as potential future brand sites. While each school or resource has its own branding, it needed to feel as though they were also pieces of a whole, and they all needed to be able to be updated in the same way.

The Prepared Montessorian launched in December of 2020, with the sibling sites, Academy of Thought & Industry and Guidepost Montessori both following in the second quarter of 2021. The sites have received extensive positive feedback, and our team continues to launch and build new websites for the Higher Ground team.

We began with one of their smaller brand sites, The Prepared Montessorian, to prove out the design and development model.

Once we had a clearly articulated information architecture and high-level user experience, we dug into the nitty gritty of each key page and moment. From there, we defined a clear design framework that fulfilled the specified needs of The Prepared Montessorian and could be adapted for each of Higher Ground’s different brands.

In parallel, we outlined a new tech stack that would provide extensibility, allow for third-party software integrations, and was easily reproducible for each website, from front-to-back.

The Prepared Montessorian is a training and professional development program that helps bring the Montessori method to new teachers, and offers training deplomas and continued learning options.

Our team approached design from the ground up, with a focus on being scalable in the long-term, using a rich, editorial content-first approach.

With the serious nature of the content, our team decided to bring forward the individuals behind the scenes, putting them at the forefront of each site to emphasize authority and trust. As many of the pages were intended to lead various demographics to contacting the Higher Ground teams, this also helped create a personal connection with the user.

Guidepost Montessori is a network of over 80 schools around the globe designed for teaching children ages 0 to 14 through the Montessori method.

We designed a componentized framework that could be reused and styled for each website within the Higher Ground network.

Following the completion of the user experience design, our team moved to visual design, integrating the updated branding of each website through the use of color, typography, and stylistic elements.

The Academy of Thought and Industry is a middle and high school network dedicated to Montessori teaching for independent, self-motivated adolescents.

In parallel with the design of the website, our team rethought the websites’ architecture.

We selected Next.js and Sanity CMS, a pair of technologies that have been battle-proven and will scale well as the sites (and network of sites) continues to grow.

Sanity provides a highly customizable user-friendly editor, allowing less technical Higher Ground employees to easily update, modify, or create new pages on each website without the help of a developer.

Developed a kit of components that could be easily cloned and branded for each website within their network, making it possible to spin up new websites quickly.

Set each site up to be statically-generated, allowing them to be distributed on global CDNs reducing load times.

Created a series of backend APIs to integrate with their third-party services.

Montessorium is Higher Ground's think tank, dedicated to exploring, understanding, and explaining the philosophy of Higher Ground Education.

Network of Websites

We redesigned a network of school websites to align with their new brand.

Higher Ground Schools

Pizzatime is a service that allows remote teams and virtual events to have real, freshly cooked food delivered to event attendees on-demand.

As more and more companies have gone fully- or even partially-remote, Pizzatime has provided a much needed means of team bonding and attendance improvement to virtual events.

Pizzatime launched in mid-2019 and has grown over 10x as of the end of 2021. It now offers four products: Pizzatime, Coffeetime, Lunchtime, and Drinktime.

Our team concepted, designed, developed, and grew Pizzatime internally from the ground up.

We wanted to create a product for remote teams that encouraged team bonding and togetherness. As a remote team since inception at Planetary, we love finding new ways to improve the remote team experience, and bring folks together at a distance. Being able to share a meal together, virtually, seemed like a great opportunity.

We first experimented with this type of experience internally in 2015, and decided in 2019 to bring it to market as a product we could offer to other companies.

Our first launch was a “minimum viable product,” relying on no-code and low-code tooling to build the entirety of the product.

Introducing a new product, especially in a new or young business vertical, meant that we needed to quickly grab a prospective customer’s attention and hold it for long enough that they understood the value of the product.

As part of the wireframing process, the design team worked to find a structure to the page that would hold a customer’s attention by using a ‘storytelling’ format. The content of the page was designed to flow naturally from top-to-bottom, allowing a user to unfold each aspect of the product as they scroll through the landing page.

 was our first offering, we would likely be introducing additional offerings in the future. The landing page was designed to be modular enough that it could be easily copied and modified for future products, which worked successfully for the launches of our 

We approached the design of both the brand and website through the use of bold colors, heavy typography, and vibrant imagery that would garner attention of anyone that landed on the website.

The landing page focuses on driving a customer toward booking, where they are then guided step by step through the booking process. We selected Typeform as the (somewhat atypical) booking form, due to it’s simplicity and ease of use, allowing us to avoid overwhelming the customer with a long booking form, instead providing just one input at a time.

Due to the complexity of the “supply chain” involved in delivering a “just-in-time” fresh, locally-made product to thousands of customers, we decided to keep the technology behind the product as simple as possible.

We relied on extensive no-code and low-code tooling to build the initial product, using Webflow for the website, Typeform for booking and order placement, Airtable for our database and order management, Stripe for billing, and tied it all together using Zapier and Pipedream.

For the marketing site, we put Webflow to use.

Webflow is an excellent no-code platform that allows the design and development of marketing websites without any (or very minimal) code knowledge.

From Planetary’s experience with it from other client work, our team decided that it’s implementation here would allow our design team to fully execute and maintain the website, reducing the load and effort of the development team.

Our approach to the backend uses a series of no-code and low-code tools to build a complete booking and order management system.

Tying Typeform and Airtable together allows our team to very easily intake new bookings, and collect orders for each event. A small amount of code was written to tie Typeform to Stripe’s payment gateway, creating a smooth booking experience with under 100 lines of code written.

Once a booking is received, an email confirmation and receipt is sent to the host, and a notification was sent to Slack to notify the planning (ordering) team.

Finally, SendGrid was chosen to handle final event receipts, transactional, and marketing emails. Webhooks from Stripe were tied together using Pipedream, allowing the platform to automatically send off emails at the appropriate time, while allowing our growth team the ability to reach out to both previous and active customers.

Product

We created a remote team building product that serves real food.

Pizzatime

Miss Hall’s School came to us looking for a complete digital makeover.

The team faced three crucial problems they needed to solve: their current website did not clearly represent the values and identity of the school, their new branding needed to be adapted for web use, and their existing tech stack was a costly hindrance and source of frustration. Additionally, the school wanted to avoid similar problems in the future by keeping the website fresh but cohesive through frequent updates made by those who know Miss Hall’s most intimately; they did not want to be held back waiting on developers to make these updates.

We began by working with the school to identify target audiences, key objectives, and crucial pain points in the user experience of the website and the tech stack supporting it. With this information, we crafted a new hierarchy of information and website layout that would deliver priority information in an immersive, storytelling-style experience.

Student Stores and other Miss Hall's Pages

The school had recently refreshed their branding but wished to evolve it further by using it in unique and interesting ways in the new website design.

Over the course of several iterations, we adapted their new print-centric branding into a digital theme that is fun but professional, welcoming, and informative.

Behind the scenes, we put together a tech stack that supported the website and it’s features, including an email marketing and automation system, donation processing, a direct line of communication with website visitors, website analytics, and an event management platform. The crux of all these systems was a content management system that allows the school to organize and custom all elements that appear on the website to create custom templates and pages.

The website launched in the fall of 2020 and received a highly positive reception from faculty, staff, students, alumni, and student parents alike.

The school wanted to modernize and improve the performance of their website while also providing a more comprehensive and cohesive mobile experience.

To improve page load times and overall site performance, our team decided to utilize static page generation alongside other techniques like lazy loading, image pre-optimization, and link prefetching.

Prior to bringing in our team, Miss Hall’s had developed new brand guidelines for print. We worked with them to translate and extend these guidelines to a digital branding system that would be used across the website and online marketing materials.

From this new digital branding system we built a library of responsive components for different use cases like galleries, video showcases, quotes, links to internal pages, recent stories, recent events, programs and courses, values, short and long form text. This allowed us to build out the site using this library of reusable components.

Additionally, we wanted to ensure that the site could easily be searched and that old pages were redirected appropriately. Search was integrated deeply within the website, using Algolia to provide a comprehensive, high-quality search experience. We also worked with the school to identify key pages to redirect from the existing site, ensuring that the transition from the old site to new was seamless.

Implemented a new CMS optimized for static page generation

Built a highly optimized and statically generated website

Implemented new, more powerful search using Algolia

Implemented a build process that deploys the website to a global CDN within moments of publishing

The new site was built with mobile in squarely mind, as parents and prospective students are often on a variety of devices when evaluating, researching, and reading about new schools.

With the website, we enabled the Miss Hall’s team to create unique pages without developer intervention by giving them a series of components and modules via a custom implementation in Sanity CMS.

Additionally, we created moments throughout the experience for users to interact with the content. This allowed us to build an interactive storytelling experience that was not just passive and consumption based; through short videos from students, quote and photo carousels, and interest pickers for smart course suggestions, we allow the visitors to learn and understand Miss Hall’s through multiple lenses.

Developed a digital brand design system extended from their brand guidelines for print materials

Used this design system to design a library of responsive sections for different use cases like galleries, video showcases, quotes, links to internal pages, recent stories, recent events, programs and courses, values, short and long form text

Enabled them to create unique pages by selecting sections and ordering them in different ways for each page via a custom implementation into Sanity CMS

Created moments throughout the experience for users to interact with the content, short videos from students, quote and photo carousels, interest pickers for smart course suggestions

Created a searchable staff directory to allow visitors to get in contact with the right faculty.

Designed a flexible article component to allow stories with and without featured images as well as stories with featured student quotes

We reconceptualized the website for Miss Hall's School based on their rebrand.

Miss Hall's School

Today, Best Home Furnishings manufactures over 2,400 styles of furniture with over 800 different fabrics and leathers.

With over 4,000 retail distributors worldwide, Best needed a new way of managing the constantly updating catalog of styles, configurations, and fabric choices for their customers. Since the company mostly doesn’t sell direct-to-consumer, they needed to ensure that the salespeople at each retailer had the most up-to-date options.

Prior to our work, retailers relied on the existing paper catalog and a manually completed paper form that was error-prone and often out-of-date. We worked with Best to devise, design, and build a tablet app that retailers can use on the sales floor to customize and build Best furniture for order.

The manufacturer wanted to streamline the process of placing orders on the sales floor to reduce total time-to-order while also cutting the number of potential errors.

Our team set out to first understand how salespeople at each retailer currently placed orders. We spent time with the Best team, their retailers, and our agency partner to understand where the biggest pain points lay. We wanted to be sure that the app we built didn’t just represent a mobile catalog but actively improved the order placement experience for both the customer and the salesperson.

Additionally, on the Best-side, we wanted to ensure that they had easy access to both placed orders and retailer analytics. This was something new for them—they never had real-time analytics data that they could breakdown by day available at their fingertips. This would open up the ability to better understand which stores were top performers, average daily sales of their products, and even the busiest days of the week.

Over the next several months, we used the experience and pain points we uncovered to design an app that brought the ordering experience to an entirely new level for this decades-old family-owned manufacturer.

Built cross-platform Android and iOS tablet app that could be quickly deployed on commodity hardware

Designed an administrative system that allows the updating of the entire furniture and configuration library from the existing company database

Introduced a new suite of actionable analytics for the Best team to use with retailers

Deployed the app to kiosk-scale screens for retail floor placement

The retail app presents the customer (or salesperson) with a catalog of furniture types, from sofas to armchairs to footrests. Once they select the core piece, they can continue with the customization of many options (such as arms/no arms) and fabrics. All prices are shown in real time.

For the Best team, we created an admin dashboard that allowed them to manage their retailer’s lists of stores, individual sales accounts, and all of the products in the catalog. The team could review analytics by store, region, or salesperson, as well as deep-dive into individual products.

Mobile and Web Apps

We reinvented the furniture customization process for a family-owned furniture company.

Best Home Furnishings

 have spent at least some time working remotely.

Companies everywhere are realizing the benefit of being able to provide a flexible work environment and source employees from anywhere. Many tech companies, such as InVision, Buffer, Customer.io, and Zapier boast fully remote teams, with more companies joining this group every day.

We built and run a service to help distributed teams.

Google Impact Challenge

Prudential 4.01K

Next Project