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Nihal Pai
Designer | Programmer | Musician
SEW.
UI Design | UX Audits | Logos | Icons
My internship with SEW, LLC served as my first foray into UI/UX work. The experience was an excellent introduction to the field and gave me the opportunity to get my hands dirty with tons of guidance from professional mentors. The projects I was assigned consisted of logo designs for the anticipated Program & Rebate Management service, iconography for general use, revamps of the Utility Co. login page, and data visualisation for the Smart Customer Mobile (SCM) product. Throughout these undertakings, I worked within a team of 3 other interns under a mentor (the company's lead designer). My role as a UI/UX intern involved pitching my design rationales to my team, discussing their pros & cons, and providing feedback to my colleagues in an agile-development work environment.
Tools Used:
Utility Co. Login Page Revamp
Problem:
The company felt that the original login page, while functional, was not visually appealing and did not adequately advertise the product's capabilities. Our challenge was to modernise its appearance for a contemporary customer base while retaining the page's core features and bolstering its business goals.
Approach:
The design process started with a comprehensive audit of the existing login page. The exercise allowed me to hone in on specific design decisions that detracted from seamless user flow and appealing visual aesthetic. Examples of issues I sought to remedy ranged from layout crowding, incongruent visual language, unappealing typefaces, and bland colour palettes. Here's the resulting wireframe of my proposed solution containing justifications and potential drawbacks for my modifications:
Resulting Mockups:
The next phase involved fleshing out my base wireframe with different strokes while documenting the major decisions I made. This part really eased me into the flow of iterative ideation and helped me develop a vocabulary for design evaluations. Here are some of the prevailing solutions I presented to my design lead :
SCM Data Visualisation
Problem:
Smart Customer Mobile is a consumer-facing module that provides comprehensive information about a user's energy consumption in a digestible format. One of the key elements that allows the swathes of largely quantitative data to remain comprehensible to non-technical audiences is a graph that tracks power usage over a given period of time. Some of the main functional aspects of the graph included :
- Readings of one's current usage
- A monthly budget
- Predicted usage
- Menus to adjust the time frame / power units being considered
- Options to visualise one's usage against past usage histories, usage levels of others within the same ZIP code, and against the company's usage
Unfortunately, a lot of these cool features were often overlooked by users due to the graph's overcrowded interface that made it difficult to navigate between visualisation options. SEW wanted a cleaner, more user-friendly redesign that more clearly presented these features.
Approach:
With this project, I aimed to experiment with different graph formats - from lines & webs to filled-in blocks & gradients. The goal was to create something that was visually appealing yet communicated specific quantitative information through colour-coding and intuitive visual cues. To begin with, I partitioned the existing page's elements using ruled gridlines to get a clearer sense of the proposed graph's scale and how it would best fit in with the rest of the elements of the page. After this, I began testing out the different graph concepts with different layouts, fonts, and colour schemes.
Resulting Mockups:
The following are some of the most notable iterations in my overall process :
Icons
A lot of the mockups I made required creating custom iconography. I was also enlisted to create some general-purpose icons, some of which you can find scattered on the SEW website. For some, I took heavy inspiration from stock icons found on the nounproject. The following are samples of my work :
Logos
As a final side-project, I was asked to design some logos for the company's tentative product, Program & Rebate Management. Throughout the design process, I aimed to project the core ideals behind SEW's brand identity : approachability, efficiency, and professionalism. Below, you will find many of the concepts from this incredibly iterative process :
© 2020 by Nihal Pai
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