Vivisimo, which has since been acquired by IBM, was a 10-years matured “tech startup” when I started. The product was, essentially, a search engine which we packaged for different applications. As “big data” became more and more important, we found more workflows that needed our solution. The executive team needed to identify our “beach-head” workflow, so they turned to our tiny, two-woman design team for some quick proof-of-concept creation.
This was my first exposure to an Agile project development environment, and the term “UI design.” I got to cut my teeth at some proto-UX, interviewing our executives and stakeholders and designing workflow-specific dashboards like the CRM concept above. I deployed my “dog food” to our executive team via our Sharepoint intranet, gathered feedback, developed mockups for new workflows, and revised old mockups in Agile design sprints.