Role: Product Designer
Disciplines: Interface, interaction, and brand design
Project Date Range: Sep 2021 - Jul 2022
Quality Counts hired me to redesign and brand an experimental tool and bring it to production status. To accomplish this task, I created a design system called Cardinal. By zooming into individual interface elements and zooming out, as I discuss in my process page, I was able to refine both the product's experience and how the interface elements come together. The resulting tool helps citizens and city planners grow their communities.
The team successfully delivered an updated version of DataPoint (2.0), which includes advanced planning features to understand if sections of a road were at, over, or under capacity based on historical traffic data. With the creation of Cardinal, the team was able to experiment with other ideas quickly to find product market fit, such as using computer vision systems to count traffic instead of the tubes traditionally found across roads. It was a pleasure to guide the team in creating a vision for what DataPoint and other software from Quality Counts could look like in the future.
Quality Counts (QC) successfully created an experimental self-serve environment for citizens and city planners using their traffic count data via a web-based tool. However, this was their first attempt at creating a production-ready software in terms of performance and user experience. As QC had no experience in software development, they hired me to lead the creative direction and work with internal resources and a contracted development team to create a software division of the company.
The challenge was to create a tool that engineers could use to make informed design decisions, while also being simple enough for citizens to quickly validate assumptions about traffic capacity in their community.