⮢

Kivu

2018 — 2019

For over a year and a half, I supported the visual and product design direction and collaborated on the discovery, design, and test of new features and their implementation.

Kivu wants to simplify the life of analysts who need to deal with big amounts of data every single day. Their mission is to make network analysis and visualization a standard for big data analytics. As the lead designer, I had to reimagine how Kivu's Dashboard could improve in showing data and how that would be impacting both visually and functionally to make the product recognizable and different from the main competitors. Our approach tried to highlight the nature of the data and keep the user interface elements as subtle as possible. While being part of the in-house product and front-end team, we also developed the basics of Kivu's design language and component library and continued to improve working processes together with the developers and the product manager.

Dealing with design debt

They already had some essential components (in Angular) that were used to build the product, so the changes performed in their design language were relatively easy to apply. I worked hand-in-hand with the front-end developers to understand how to tackle those components and their limitations. Additionally, I supported the creation of categorical and sequential color palettes for data visualization.

The dashboard

At the same time that we were trying to define the basic foundations of Kivu’s language and its product, I was in close collaboration with the product manager building the features that were needed for the MVP. Among other things, I was involved in the integration of Twitter and Instagram data into the dashboard.