Product Design

Crittercism

At Crittercism, we had the opportunity to help establish a start up as a thought leader in the Application Performance Monitoring field. By using tested design methods, including user research and analyzing customer data, we were able to design features which would later become industry standard. Starting with a small company of a dozen employees, we were able to see Crittercism grow to nearly a hundred, before their acquisition by VMWare.

The initial challenge of Crittercism was to make it clear to customers exactly what information was being shown and why. The vast sums of data which Crittercism could acquire required that we elevate pertinent information to the customer, so that they can get powerful insights into what is occurring within their app. By letting customers sort through their crash reports in a variety of ways, we provided them with the tools they required to make decisions about bugs and how to solve them. Eventually, we design a visualization, showing the anatomy of a crash in the form of a Transaction Timeline, enabling developers so that they can quickly scan for patterns and trends in their crash reports. Our biggest accomplishment was to design crash contextualization, a feature which allowed customers to assign specific dollar values to a crash. This feature has now become common across the entire industry, which we are quite proud of.

In addition to designing their product, we were also given the opportunity to rebrand the company, from scrappy start up, to professional player. Creating style guides and establishing their use of color and other design elements, their product had a strongly unified feel across all channels.