Enterprise Power. Consumer Feel.
Apptio IT Financial Management Foundation is a self-service cloud-hosted solution that streamlines the process of creating and tuning budget and forecast models. Entire organizations can collaborate in real time without ever opening an email program.
Death to Spreadsheets
Without spreadsheet overload, budget owners can quickly build annual budgets and multi-year plans. Built-in tools for building scenario and what-if analysis give budget owners the power to tune forecasts accurately and share with the click of a button.
Unveiling of first version of IT Planning Foundation at the 2014 TBM Conference
My Role
As this product was Apptio's first self-service SaaS offering, I led the visual design effort championing information design best practices based on Stephen Few's “Information Dashboard Design”.
Tables with Oomph
The core UI component in virtually every view in the app is the table. The challenge for the design team was to extend functionality while still maintaining understandability of the data. The screens below demonstrate visual cues for cell, row, and column selections and hierarchical groups.
Read-only vs. Edit
Read-only cells in popular spreadsheets apps don't typically have high affordances for users. We wanted to show users that our tables could aid in quicker understanding of the data with better visual cues for distinguishing between editable and non-editable data.
Table spec on read-only vs. editable cells
Exploring Responsive Layouts
I prototyped responsive layouts with Codepen to determine whether or not this made sense for an application of this magnitude. The executive decision was that we didn't have enough resources and research to move forward.
Early prototype to test responsive layouts using JS Highcharts and Twitter Bootstrap
Labor Planning
This feature of the app was my first interaction design project at Apptio. In the video following these early design concepts, you will see the final results of both my interaction and visual design work with the table grid and the labor configuration area.
The most challenging portions of my work were communicating to budget owners how they would see updates to their actual costs as a result of editing labor units, how they could override such values, and how they could revert them. The challenge for process owners was how to initially configure field-specific values.
How Well Did We Do?
Well, rather than tell you, just watch this short video featuring Gazprom.
