Historic Futures

What my colleagues said

Empathy, intellectual acuity and complete reliability - are just three of the things I loved about working with Rachel. That empathy means she is always thinking about others - in the conversation, in the process, in the team - which is so vital for leading design and user experience work. She does that while thinking deeply about the problem being solved and remaining calm, focused and on-time. Added bonus - Rachel will very subtly and deftly improve your writing too, without you really noticing...genius!

I worked with Rachel for a number of years during my time with Historic Futures. She brings intelligence, thought and incredible attention to detail to all her work. Working with Rachel is a joy, she is collaborative yet a strong leader and is able to develop beautiful designs to even complex concepts. She is a true UX designer, ensuring the user is at the forefront of all her design work. She has great skills beyond design as well - a brilliant writer, workshop facilitator and marketeer...

My role

Mr & Mrs OK have had a relationship with Historic Futures (HF), the company behind String3, for over ten years and when they embarked on a radical rethink of their ambitious supply chain traceability software, they called us in.

After an initial period of exploration and consultation with both myself and my partner in Mr & Mrs OK, John, he moved on to other projects and I remained as the only UX / designer / front-end on the team, fully responsible for the end-to-end delivery of branding, UX, UI and front-end development. Collaborating with the close-knit team at HF, and working within an agile, behaviour driven development process, I strove for usable simplicity out of a complex problem.

Challenges and solutions

As a company, Historic Futures was somewhat ahead of its time, trying to bring visibility and traceability to complex supply chains before anyone else was successfully doing this.

Much of the UX and UI challenge in this project was how to bring clarity and user-focus to the complex requests, both for the end clients - big retailers - and for those suppliers further up the chain who might be much smaller and distributed internationally.

One philosophy we wanted to adhere to was thinking about the individual people answering these requests for information, rather than thinking of them as companies. These people wouldn't necessarily want to use the tool, but rather had to use it to keep their customers happy, so it needed to be as simple and intuitive as possible. This led to a question and answer based approach which tried to distill the complex requests into individual questions and answers about specific batches of material.

Once the responses were in, there was also the challenge of presenting the information back to the client in an informative and elegant way.

We designed a unique 'Question Progress Report' to visualise the data which handled the issue of multiple batches coming from different suppliers while still remaining readable.

Branding and design system

As part of the project, I designed the branding for String3. The String3 logo consists of an 'S3' logomark and the 'STRING' logotype.

The String3 logomark contains an 'S' picked out of sections of a hexagon. Hexagons are particularly significant because tesselating hexagonal structures are the most efficient way of covering a plane, they use the least amount of material (in comparison with say tesselated triangles or squares). This is why they are so often found in nature, for example in honeycombs. This chimes with the aims of String3, being the most efficient way to traverse a supply network.

The 'S' being picked out of tesselating shapes within the hexagon also speaks of interconnectedness. The shapes fit together and connect to make a whole which signifies more than the sum of its parts (i.e. an 'S' as well as a hexagon), just as String3 connects individual parts of a supply network to give a greater clarity than knowing the individual parts would alone.

The shading of the hexagon gives both a sense of three-dimensionality and transparency, like a gemstone. The three-dimensionality represents the real-world products that String3 helps brands to trace and the transparency represents the view into those supply networks that String3 affords. The illusion of a gemstone suggests the value of String3, along with sharpness and hardness of the data it reveals.

The '3' is positioned in relation to the hexagon specifically to look like String 'cubed'. This suggests again the three-dimensional nature of String3. String3 works not only across a single supply network but also through time across multiple networks.

The logo also derives from and can contain the existing Historic Futures logo, giving a sense of continuity and belonging to HF.

I created a usage guide for the logo inside the online design system I built, along with guidelines for the rest of the brand identity.

This online design system also housed an HTML and CSS prototype, used both for communicating the design to the rest of the team and as a platform for usability testing.