Coolfire

2019-07-01

Coolfire

Hot new branding for a startup SaaS product

Background

I was a Senior UX Designer at Coolfire Solutions which was part agency part SaaS startup. They were working on a new project called Ronin and I was given a chance to design the web experience.

I needed to design the marketing site, a developer dashboard (not shown), as well as sample applications to demonstrate the platform features. You can check out my write up about the Ronin Chat sample app here.

Process

I worked with marketing and engineering to understand who the target customers were. The first was a Technology VP, somebody in a leadership position looking to save time, money, or both while building their next application. This persona was looking for detailed information about pricing, platform value, time and cost savings, and how the platform scales.

The other persona was a Developer, the boots on the ground actually using the platform to build things. They were looking for documentation about specific features, tutorials to get started, and flexibility in how they could use the tools. To understand the developer persona more I interviewed our in-house teams, seeking to understand how they evaluate and use different technology for their own projects.

I put basic wire frames in front of stake holders to get feedback. We did some design iteration around a new one-click onboarding flow and de-emphasized the pricing (it was a bit ambiguous). From there I designed screens for FAQ, support, and billing.

Design Artifacts

Design feedback was strong and positive. Ronin was just a code name picked by management because they liked the name - this was the first time it came to life as a brand. The project was a blast and I was very happy with the illustrations that came out of it (all made using Sketch).

Brendan has an infectious attitude that leaves you feeling excited to execute on the designs and concepts that he creates. He has also been a great mentor to the design team and has helped to bring them up to speed quickly.

Nicholas Kajok

Staff Engineer, Coolfire Solutions