eCat: an e-catalog
In April of 2010, I began working with Sarreid LTD, a furniture company that wanted to create an iPad application so their sales reps to easily complete orders and prepare sales presentations for customers. The project was so successful that it spun off into its own business and eCat was born.
eCat, by SuperCat Solutions, enables companies to showcase their products through a beautifully designed iPad application and complete sales in any location. The application is designed to work seamlessly online and offline so that a orders can be composed offline and synced when convenient.
My role on the project was lead designer. I created the initial wireframes for the iPad application and established the initial direction for the visual design.
Wireframing
After sitting down with the client to discuss the goals of the project, I did a series of wireframes using Balsamiq Mockups to identify the heart of the application. The wireframes generated a lot of collaborative discussion. After a few additional iterations we were ready to begin development.
One benefit of using Balsamiq Mockups for the wireframes was that I was able to use hotspots so that the wireframes became fully clickable prototypes. This enabled us to get a great handle on how the application would behave before spending time on development.
Visual design
The look and feel of the application leveraged the existing styles of iOS. The desire was for a design that would be easy to implement and iterate on. Black was prominently used as a background color to put the emphasis on the product. Fonts were chosen with serifs as a slight nod to the existing Sarreid brand.
Although the style of the application has been updated since I left the project (because everything in iOS went flat) I’m still proud of the original design. It was relatively easy to build (which was our goal) while at the same time remaining faithful to the classiness of the Sarreid brand.
“John Long designed the UI for our companys SaaS client, eCat, just two months after the iPad was first introduced in late April 2010. Our goal was to replace paper sales materials with an iPad based electronic catalog that could work offline, be updated remotely, and function as a new type of order entry device for the furniture industry. The biggest challenge was that our target users were non-technical furniture sales reps and had been selling successfully with the same paper sales tools for many years. They weren’t sure they wanted to risk changing to a new process. So ease of use and closely mimicking the legacy sales process were priorities.
“John’s design was so well done that the first group of 30 reps took to eCat immediately with minimal training and never looked back. The day we went live, the company replaced over two and a half tons of paper sales material with 30 iPads. There was so much positive interest in what we were doing that we founded a new company, SuperCat Solutions, to take the product to market.
“Now, almost six years later, over 60 distribution and manufacturing companies and thousands of professional sales reps are using the app. The functionality has been extended, but John’s original UI is basically unchanged. Reps who use both eCat and competing apps tell me eCat is by far the easiest and fastest to use. The great UI design is still one of our company’s most important competitive advantages.
“John was a good team member and did a great job translating our wish list into reality. We’d definitely work with John again if the opportunity presented itself.”
—Steve Thrasher, SuperCat Solutions, Founder