Doodle4 heuristic review and interface consultation

Doodle4 is a new app for promoting causes through making and sharing doodles. Pitched at teen Facebook users, the app’s powerful doodling tool and easy sharing process make it simple and fun to build awareness of a cause by creating doodling “challenges” for friends to pass around.

Nimble Partners collaborated with the Doodle4 team to first provide a heuristic review of an alpha interface on web and mobile devices. We walked through the app as “Ione,” a lightweight persona we developed of a teen interested in banning styrofoam containers in her community. The walkthrough uncovered opportunities to improve the flow of use, wording, and engagement. We followed up the review with rapid iterations of sketches to provide specific recommendations for improvements. We remained on the team as iterations were made through beta launch.

Services provided:

• Heuristic review
• UI sketches
• User experience consulting

Doodle4 designer Ryen Leung provides a great overview of this fun tool in the first five minutes of this video:

Mind and Life Institute information architecture and UX design

The Mind and Life Institute researches and supports interest in contemplative science, bringing together scientists and scholars from contemplative traditions to investigate topics such as addiction, ethics, and emotions. As part of repositioning itself based on a new set of initiatives (ethics, education, and human development; craving, desire, and addiction; and mapping the mind), MLI wanted to redesign its website to promote deep investigation into the wealth of research the organization has funded and encouraged.

We began by drafting scenarios for the three primary audiences – scientists, scholars, and "interested laymen" – relying on MLI's experience with those groups, as well as our own interviews with interested laymen, to define desired interactions. Based on those scenarios, we developed a site structure and wireframes for a responsive experience that used curated promotions to expose relationships between multiple types of site content, allowing visitors a complete picture of the latest insights in contemplative science. We consulted with the visual designer and the development team through site launch to ensure that our layouts were accurately translated to the final site.

Services provided:

• User experience conceptualization and design
• Information architecture
• User interface design
• Visual design consultation

MLI home page wireframe

MLI initiative page wireframe with related content links at right

MLI featured editorial page wireframe with related content links and fat navigation dropdown

MLI home page. Visual design by John Hall Design Group; development by pixelslam.

Mobile phone view of home page

Featured editorial page

Big data UX, UI and IA

For the past three and a half years, Nimble Partners has worked with a big data company to design two suites of web and mobile-friendly applications investigating multiple aspects of the labor market, including demand, supply, job posting, job search, and career exploration. The applications serve a wide user base: job seekers of all ages and backgrounds, the state and local government officials assisting them, public- and private-sector employees researching labor market opportunities, and others.
We worked directly with customers, product management, and developers to redesign some applications, while building others entirely from scratch. Our work included both the customer-facing user experience as well as the tools administrators rely on daily to help job seekers and manage the applications. Customers were delighted with the results: one said we’d “nailed Jell-O to a tree.”

We provided:

• User experience conceptualization and design
• Information architecture
• User interface design
• Visual design
• User testing

We can't show this work publicly. Contact us for access to samples via our demo site.

Increasing appeal for LoveToKnow

LoveToKnow provides advice on everything from beauty tips and pet health to travel recommendations and party-planning. We helped LoveToKnow provide more consistency and a better user experience by first analyzing their taxonomy as part of a larger search engine marketing project with Nine By Blue. LoveToKnow returned to us to redesign their site to improve its appeal and apply the new taxonomy to an updated, easier-to-use menu system.

As we translated wireframes into visual design, we ran remote usability tests to determine whether our approach resonated with the target audience. LoveToKnow's revenue model is ad-driven, and we paid close attention to this as we wireframed possible design approaches and feature refinements. Test results confirmed that the new designs helped people better understand the breadth of LoveToKnow's content, and that the new article page design better achieved the goal of site exploration.

Work included:

• Taxonomy analysis
• Visual redesign
• Heuristic review
• Usability testing

Remote usability tests used a split screen to display a survey and relevant page designs (top: current design; bottom: new design).

Original home page page design.

New home page design.

New article page and fat navigation.

Focusing on the future – website planning for the International Development Innovation Network

The International Development Innovation Network, led by MIT’s D-Lab, provides training and resources for innovators worldwide to create new processes and products that improve the lives of people in poverty. IDIN works from the ground up by serving local innovators; community members are most familiar with their own situation, and most motivated to improve it.

We helped the IDIN team organize and narrow down its goals for a new site by developing user scenarios with the team and mapping goals to specific audience needs. Through an interview with the program's sponsors at USAID, as well as a paper prototype review session with summit alumni, we gathered audience feedback on valuable features and expected usage, which provided further insights into how to structure the site and design key interactions.

Moving from audience and feature analysis into information architecture, we led a collaborative workshop with IDIN staff to map content and features into page types and a high-level site organization. This groundwork helped prepare IDIN for usability testing and a full site redesign.

Work included:

• stakeholder and user interviews
• user scenarios – based on real people and interactions
• prototype development
• site map
• content inventory and planning
• high-level wireframes

Whiteboard notes from content mapping session.

Left: home page wireframe (mobile view). Right: project page wireframe (desktop view).

CafePress information architecture and user experience

CafePress is an established custom printing e-tailer. We worked with the product marketing team to improve how people find products on their site. We conducted a heuristic review to identify IA, visual design, and usability issues, and showed options for changes that addressed UX in schematic layouts (visual wireframes).

Follow-on work included exploring identity options and visual site design.

CafePress' home page at the time (left) and our wireframed recommendations (right), which included simplifying the header area to highlight search, making main product navigation more prominent, and improving promotion display to spotlight new and hot products in a clean, uncluttered layout.


CafePress' existing search engine results page (left) and our wireframed recommendations (right). To help welcome shoppers and guide them effectively, we suggested eliminating redundant links and limiting the number of subcategories displayed.

Science Festival Alliance website refresh

The Science Festival Alliance supports the development and promotion of science festivals worldwide. We worked with the SFA to reorganize their existing website, design a new home page, and extend elements of the redesign throughout the site. We also improved their dynamic map to display member and non-member science festivals around the world, and designed a downloadable calendar widget anyone could install on their own site to keep up with where and when the latest festivals take place.

We provided:

• Information architecture
• Visual design

SFA home page

Map of member and non-member festivals worldwide

SFA news page

MIT Annotation Studio UI

Annotation Studio is a set of collaborative online annotation tools developed by MIT’s HyperStudio program. The software allows students to annotate literary texts and other documents with text, video, audio, and hyperlinks. Students may also view and build upon each other’s notes, allowing for a more participatory experience than traditional solo book review and annotations.

MIT approached us to refine Annotation Studio’s color palette, typography, iconography, and visual approach to displaying annotations and other metadata. To meet technical requirements, we designed styles and visual elements that could quickly be implemented within Twitter Bootstrap.

Work included:

• Heuristic review
• Visual design refinement

List of documents

Highlighting text to annotate

Saving an annotation

Juniper internal app research & concept

Juniper Networks uses multiple internal tools to keep track of sales-related technical documentation. In an effort to consolidate those tools, Juniper approached us to design a proof-of-concept for a new, mobile-friendly application. We interviewed sales engineers as well as the people who manage and support them to understand the different situations and patterns of use. Based on those interviews, we designed multiple approaches for an intuitive, intelligent, and responsive search interface that guided users to the most recent and relevant information.

Work included:

• User research
• UX design

Catapult.org user experience

Catapult.org is a Webby-nominated crowdfunding website devoted to projects that improve the lives of girls and women worldwide. Nimble Partners worked with Catapult's founding team from concept to launch to define the overall user experience, specify all content and interactions, and work with visual design and development.

UX work included exploring engaging ways to find projects, testing an interactive prototype, and specifying all administration features for the site.

We're thrilled that in the first year 286 projects were funded, and that the site is going strong!

Home page wireframe:


Home page, designed by Hyperakt and developed by Mindgrub based on our wireframes and information architecture.


Working out content and features for the project page:


Project page, designed by Hyperakt and coded by Mindgrub:


Teams page wireframe:


Teams page, designed by Hyperakt and coded by Mindgrub:


Sample administrative interface screens:

Evidence for Action – UX & IA for MamaYe websites

Evidence for Action (E4A) is a five-year program designed to improve maternal and newborn survival in Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania.

We worked with E4A to develop the user experience for six country sites and one umbrella site, defining content and interactions to serve NGOs, local advocacy workers, and pregnant women, among others. Since some audiences would primarily access the site through mobile phones with slow connections, the sites had to keep performance and usability in mind while providing critical features, such as publishing tools and a dynamic catalog of downloadable advocacy materials.

Wireframe for MamaYe "parent" site home page, left, and country home page, right. The parent site provides an overview of the initiative and aggregates downloadable resources from all six countries.

Final parent site home page, left, and Sierra Leone home page, right. Designed by Georgia Lee and Jordan Chatwin of Advocacy International and developed by Catch Digital based on our wireframes and information architecture.

MIT Hyperstudio US-Iran document archive UX and visual design

MIT’s Hyperstudio developed a faceted database that archived correspondence between the United States and Iran from the 1980s through the late 2000s. Nimble Partners designed an appealing, usable, and culture-neutral interface to help scholars search the database, view documents, and make online annotations.

Home page

Faceted search interface

Document detail view, including annotations area

4INFO admin UI design

4INFO, a mobile ad delivery and analytics company, needed help evaluating a mobile ad campaign management platform's alpha interface for potential UX design issues. Nimble Partners reviewed the interface in progress and honed its feature set and application flow through multiple rounds of discussion and wireframing. We also designed visuals for the application and consulted with the development team as they applied the new look and feel.

Work included:

• UI and UX analysis and design
• Wireframing
• Visual design

Wireframes for campaign page (top) and campaign edit flow (bottom)

Visual designs for campaign page (top) and campaign edit flow (bottom)

Application color usage guide

MIT Biology information design and user testing

MIT’s Biology Department wanted to redesign its website to offer prospective and current students a better overview of the research, collaborative mentoring, and career skills the program provides. Having already completed a survey of its students, faculty, and staff, the department had an initial sense of the most urgent problems they needed to solve in the site; specifically, how to drive people to the right content in a site comprising more than 150 pages.

Nimble Partners identified key scenarios of use for the site, analyzed its content, and developed a new information architecture that addressed key user priorities like identifying deadlines and locating faculty and staff. We also designed several rounds of wireframes to dive deeper into content and feature needs. The wireframes served as the foundation for an interactive prototype we reviewed in talking-protocol usability tests with students, faculty, and staff to confirm assumptions and refine site organization and features before visual design began.

Work included:

• Content inventory and analysis
• Scenario development
• Information architecture
• Usability testing

Home page wireframe

Interior page wireframes for category home (top) and degrees (bottom)

Faculty and staff directory with faceted search

Biology website visual design by Stoltze Design. Development by Indigo Digital and Common Media.