InkyBee

Forth Metrics approach me to work with them on their new startup InkyBee, a complex online SAAS tool which helped brands and PR consultants manage their digital outreach, finding relevant blogs to build a relationship with and to manage that communication.

I worked with Forth Metrics on a part-time freelance basis for several years from the product ideation to the iteration and front end development of established functionality.

The idea for InkyBee was fleshed out inside the founders heads but needed to be transformed into some initial specifications for the developers to begin coding. We started the project off with a whiteboard session to understand what the required functionality and the user journeys would be. We created personas for the our 3 main user types: PR Consultant (agency-side); PR Manager (client-side); and Small Business/Band manager; and prioritised and checked functionality against their requirements throughout the process. This involved drawing simple process flows and very basic UI sketches on whiteboards and on paper to iterate through ideas quickly until we felt we had a decent plan for an MVP.

With a fresh understanding of what the product had to do, we turned these sketches and drawings into a formal user-flow document, a functionality spec marked up with priority for different users types and an initial set of wireframes.

The visual design of InkyBee was important not just because they wanted a beautiful product but because the amount of data we would be communicating had to be clear and easy to understand. Some pages would have tables which communicated detailed reports on blog posts reach and engagement which had to be easily understood. The visual design we created is clean and minimal, presenting that information in a digestible way.

I worked closely with Forth Metrics development team in India to code, test and iterate on the user interface using the latest technologies.