Turi
Design Lead
Turi (then called GraphLab - and later Dato) is a machine learning platform for developers and data scientists. I joined the company when they were just twelve computer engineers and data scientists working to define and build their product.
As the first designer I was responsible for designing the brand, website, product and all marketing collateral including tradeshow branding, product videos, booth design and swag.
Branding
GraphLab (rebranded Turi) originated as an open-source project out of Carnegie Mellon. The exising brand consisted of a whimsical logo with a dog illustration and two colors. The first directive I was given was to create a brand that made us "look bigger than we were.” It had to strike a balance that could appeal to our existing open-source community base, and the new enterprise customers our product was being built for.
Branded Tradeshow Booth
Brand Matrix
Developed a "Company Values" questionnaire which I shared with employees to assist in understanding how we viewed ourselves internally, as well as how the company wanted to be perceived externally.
Generated a word cloud using the descriptive words I’d gathered from the questionnaire.
Conducted a competitive analysis of the industry, producing a market-survey brand matrix that plotted our competitors (from whimsical to serious, and market type: open-source to commercial).
These exercises determined where our brand should be positioned in the market and informed my design direction.
Redesigned and rebranded logo
Brand Pallette
I concluded that our brand needed to be vibrant, friendly, helpful and intelligent. My initial thought upon seeing the existing logo was “the dog has to go!” After completing the branding process, I found myself coming 360º to the realization that the dog was actually the key. It needed merely to be reimagined to represent the eager, friendly, intelligent and helpful personality the company had. I opted for a silhouette treatment to avoid any overpowering personality or expression that could be misunderstood or misinterpreted. I chose a stance that suggested playfulness yet eager to help. The color was meant to stand out amongst the sea of lower-case, blue logos that occupied that space. The logo was later trademarked by Apple when they acquired the company in 2016.
The color palette I created mirrors the syntax highlighting our users are familiar with.
Product Design
Exisitng Experience
The Turi platform consisted of a Python library loaded via terminal window and had no graphical interface whatsoever. Data scientists needed a way to visually explore their data, the progress and accuracy of the models they were building, the status of their deployed predictive services (jobs) and the tasks within those jobs.
Many of the data sets our customers were working with were vast – with millions of rows. The ability to customize how various features were viewed as critical.
Wire Frames
Interviewed internal data scientists as well as external users from our pilot.
Developed three personas who best represented the needs of our audience. They ranged from a computer engineer with some data science background to a CTO with extensive experience.
Created wireframes to explore how features would be incorporated and interactive prototypes to demonstrate the interactions.
Designed high-fidelity screens with assets exported for development.
I designed custom interactions and controls that afforded the user the ability to customize which columns were presented and in what graph format they want to view the data.
One custom control I designed afforded the user the ability to scroll through millions of rows of data and load into memory only the subset required. A patent (US20160018962A1) for this control was applied for in 2015 and is pending.
Web Design
Exisitng Web Experience
Our existing, open-source audience was large and enthusiastic but made up largely of academia and scientists. We needed to promote and market our new enterprise product while not alienating this base, who would eventually be working for larger companies.
A decision was made to create two separate websites, a “.org” site for the open-source version of the product that was still offered, and a “.com” site for the new commercial platform we were developing.
Wire Frames
Split the sites into separate projects so I could design unique visual identity and information architecture.
Worked directly with the CEO and product manager on the commercial site to determine how best to communicate our product's features and benefits.
Created many sets of wireframes and reviewed them internally with the team.
Designed final screens and coded website.
Turi Website
The final websites, while continually evolving, captured our new brand and announced to the world that we were here.
I implemented controls for search, filtering and sorting which afforded users a way to navigate the dense technical content and view the format and subject matter relevant to them.
Later versions of the site integrated eCommerce, application documentation, a blog, IPython Notebooks and more.
VISUAL DESIGN
