Polecat - Risk Reputation Software

This web design case study outlines my work on the risk analysis software for Polecat in Bristol. As an Interaction Designer, I helped shape the user experience and digital interface for the companies products.

My role

I worked at Polecat Intelligence as the Lead UX Designer. Polecat are are a Software and a Service Company (SaaS) producing Reputation Risk Software.

The challenge

Polecat's core product was MeaningMine a functional but unfriendly product made in Flash which is now unsupported by most browsers and due to be blocked by December 2020. My primary challenge was to recreate this product in HTML and CSS, my secondary challenge was to add value to the core product. Mainly by:

• Making it more user friendly, it had a very dark interface with lots of confusing screens.
• Enable it to be viewed on tablets and possibly mobile phones
• Introduce colour for branding but also usability - lots of colour research
• Save searches and create reports.

The approach

Create an Engagement Platform

I created initial sketches of the product which would eventually become RepVaults core layout. This started as post-it notes on a wall then sketched up in Balsmiq, then designed InVision to create initial interactions of each chart. I taught myself Bootstrap to create a fully functioning prototypes to share the design principles and content strategy with the technical team. This initial Profile Screen was the birth of RepVault.

After a year the product grew to include a Comparison Page to enable companies to benchmark themselves against their industry piers, then a Trends page which would help to view patterns in risk over a period of time. For each of these projects I ran the initial brainstorm and designed mockups to help communicate the idea to the company owners and board members.

Keeping the navigation consistent between these pages was key, they had to look like different versions of the same page and not a separate product. After research I used a dropdown navigation that would allow users to select Taxonomies, Sources and Date Ranges, these were consistent and help tie the pages together.


Polecat Hub
As RepVault grew there was a requirement for Customer Reports to be created as well as some bespoke charts for certain clients. These options eventually took up the form of a Hub which contained the applicationsRepVault, Reports and Dashboards. For the Hub, I designed the main navigation and mapped out the user journeys, the login/forgot my password process.

User research
Throughout the design process the user feedback was key. Gaining insight from customers is not always easy but various feedback sessions were organised with key stakeholders. This coupled with detailed analytics from MixPanel and from Intercom gave me crucial evidence to support changes or indicate areas where improvements and iterations were required.

Below shows a selection of screenshots from the initial prototype that captures a submission date and displays the difference or time period with todays date.