Overview
Our personal data is fragmented across multiple apps, devices, and services. At Atlas, we set out to solve the problem of forgetting where you saw or saved a piece of content. Whether it's a webpage, email, document, photo, video, or message, our mission was to put the user back in control of their data.
The Challenge
We set out to build a product that would fundamentally change the way people access and interact with their data. We wanted to help people be more productive and work smarter. We waste countless hours of our time sifting through emails, calendar invites, text messages and Slack chains to find the information we need to get things done, so we built a product that works like a searchable memory for our digital lives.
MVP product features included:
1️⃣ Remembering and indexing everything you see on your devices
2️⃣ The ability to keyword search all of your applications, cloud services, devices, and programs
3️⃣ Full data encryption to ensure privacy and security
4️⃣ No need to provide service credentials, logins, or access APIs
5️⃣ A desktop and mobile app
MY ROLE
As the fifth employee at the company and the first designer on the team, I had the opportunity to influence the direction of the product. I worked with a small team of product managers, engineers, and eventually a team of other designers and user researchers to ideate, deliver, user test, and iterate on product features.
My responsibilities and tasks:
• User stories and flows
• User personas
• Product presentations
• Wireframes
• Defining the brand and visual style
• Usability testing
• User personas
• Product presentations
• Wireframes
• Defining the brand and visual style
• Usability testing
DESIGN Process
Our design team conducted several week long design sprints to conceptualize core product features. We utilized group brainstorming, whiteboarding sessions, and other collaborative means to define our MVP features.
• RESEARCH: Interviews, competitive analysis
• IDEATION: Design sprints, brainstorming, whiteboard sessions
• SOLUTION: Sketches, wireframes, user flows, hi-fidelity mocks, prototypes
• VALIDATION: User testing
• BUILD: Design specs, functional product
• ITERATE: Improve existing features, begin ideation on new features
• IDEATION: Design sprints, brainstorming, whiteboard sessions
• SOLUTION: Sketches, wireframes, user flows, hi-fidelity mocks, prototypes
• VALIDATION: User testing
• BUILD: Design specs, functional product
• ITERATE: Improve existing features, begin ideation on new features
THE solution
We set out to create an elegant, simple UI with a robust set of features. We researched and explored the ways that human memory works and designed a visual search interface that mimicked the way we remember things. A topic or keyword search results in a relevancy ranked cluster of thumbnails. Facets for different data types (webpages, documents, email, etc.) help users to narrow results. Time facets (today, yesterday, last week, last month, etc.) help further refine results.
