Innovative Search and Browse for Massive Data – Gordian’s RSMeans Online

Browse and Search RS Means Online Catalog

Project Date: 12-6-2021

I was the sole designer on this project, managing all aspects of strategy, UX and UI. At the time, Gordon had hired a UX designer that seemed to have made progress with wireframes. We also had a legacy SaaS program that was struggling to evolve because of leadership conflicts over UI patterns, colors, etc. RSMeans online was basically a PDF version of the catalog, being sold as a Saas product – one large table. So, I was pressed to maintain a certain feel to the product to get by-in from stakeholders. Many design choices are far from influenced by real user testing. My strategy would involve research and testing design ideas to validate them. However, I could not have anticipated being blocked by stakeholder conflict about graphical user interfaces not being important and leaning more towards a Windows 1998 tabbed experience. Yes, the pushback had pushback. I agreed to come in for a 6 month stint to get them going on this online catalog; finalizing the project with a pattern library and a half-finished shared component library. The designs were met with skepticism, user testing was taken over by product, who biased in favor of the old experience. As a result my efforts were derailed, the design was added to the folder with the other designers work, and Gordon still uses the old legacy program. I did notice a few of my ideas had been implemented, like a global search…

Challenges ahead.
Without a designer on staff, any pivots related to feedaback from users after launch would need to be handleed by product. Research had an established chain of influence n the organization and would override desi\gn planning dn agile coordination in order to implement researchers’s design ideas

Catalog Search and Browse

User needed to be able to add items from the catalog to the estimate quickly.

Most annotation on the prototype describes the user behaviors and the project in more detail.

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Estimate Creation and Management Tool for RS Means Online

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View Search Prototypes

Project Date: 12-6-2021

I was the sole designer on this project, managing all aspects of strategy, UX and UI.

Estimation tool setup UI. Used for creating an estimate, the header is editable and the estimate is built with catalog entries.

Manage estimate items by adding / creating sections from the catalog without having to navigate back to the estimate screen. This keeps tasks-at-hand always in the foreground, while work is being done to the estimate – available on the estimation tab when ready to be previewed.