At Etamin Studio, we love brainstormings, we love collaborative web-apps and we love start-ups. This is why we were very pleased to work on the new design of Stormz, one of the most successful Parisian start-ups from Le Camping, season 3!
The new workshop types illustrations
Stormz.me is a web-app that enables small groups to very large groups of people to perform highly productive and playful brainstorming sessions, through well-thought sets of interactive activities.
A movie of the Cap Digital Stratcamp Stormz workshops in March 2013 (the redesign was not fully implemented at that point)
Our challenge was to redesign a less cluttered User Interface and to bring more simplicity and playfulness to the service.
This time, we kicked-off the project by analyzing together all the pros and cons of the old design. After a few hours, we came up with a list of issues and tons of ideas on how to fix them. We sketched and discussed these ideas figuring out which ones would need to be actually designed and tested.
Some of the early UI sketches that have been used to discuss UI & UX ideas during the first steps of the project
While the last bits of the new design are still being implemented by François, Alex and Cyril, here are some of the best ingredients that cooked their way through the new UI:
More legible idea cards
Idea cards are the most important UI item of the app. We designed all their states making sure they would stay both legible and cute.
New cluster design
Participants and facilitators are now able to organize in a more efficient way all the cards, using foldable clusters. Clusters bring more legibility to the final deliverable.
Better sense of progress
A colorful breadcrumb, featuring fresh activity icons permanently gives better hints of progress to the user.
Sticky toolbar + create cards on the fly
Integrated to the sticky toolbar, the “create new card” panel sticks to the top of the screen even when you’re scrolling deep down in the card-view.
Playful activity design
We wanted to motivate the user to dive in the activity, surrounding the UI with playful illustrated elements related to the theme of the activity (the bills and coins above are used for the 100$ activity)
Good-looking deliverables
Our design proposal for the final deliverable of an archived workshop, including stats, folded clusters and download button.
Also, one of the exciting points of the project is that we worked in a very agile way: most of the Stormz workshops are facilitated by certified Stormz facilitators, which made it possible to test the new design ideas in real conditions very quickly. Though, anyone can now familiarize quickly with the app and run a workshop in no time, using the Google Hangout integrated version of the app, making it possible for small teams to run collaborative and highly productive workshops remotely.
We are really happy to know that lots of brainstormings have already been performed using Stormz and that the feedback is really good!
(orignially posted on Etamin Studio's blog)
