UXReactor

I’m the president of product, technology, and operations for Guardhat Inc. We’re building the first industrial internet of people’s platform. In a way, we’re an 80-year-old startup trying to transition away from being a hardware company towards being a SaaS-based company. Our goal is to build an ecosystem.

We started as a device manufacturer; we built a smart helmet and a unique hardware set that has won many prizes due to its innovative design and features. The helmet has a lot of built-in technology with a backend platform to funnel in all the device data and make use of it by building solutions on top of it for enterprises and workers.

UXReactor designed our product's UX for two of the user personas we identified. Initially, we wanted to take a broad approach and design an experience for each user persona. However, we later decided to focus on one specific kind of user and two user personas tied to them.

Lalatendu (Senior Experience Design Strategist) was our main point of contact. Initially, we worked on the research track with a research lead and a support resource. Then, the design team took over; we had a design lead and several other teammates.

We created a detailed RFP that we sent to providers we knew of asking for proposals. Some of the other design firms that sent me prior work had better visuals and a better 'wow' factor than UXReactor. However, Satyam asserted that the 'wow' factor is short-lived, and what carries over is the complete experience.

We worked together from May 2022–February 2023.

UXReactor was very collaborative and accommodating. We didn't always make things easy for them because we didn't have the right level of product management resources, but UXReactor was very amenable. Ultimately, we developed a good camaraderie with UXReactor. Although we wanted to continue our engagement, we decided to end it due to internal financial decisions to focus on implementation and execution.

Initially, we had a six-month contract, but as we decided to narrow our focus to two user personas, we collaborated with UXReactor. Once we chose the whole native experience for two personas, UXReactor extended the contract without charging us more.

UXReactor's strength was their project management in terms of corralling and handover. Additionally, they were very strong in the research part of the project. Even though they didn't have domain expertise and it took us time to get them up to speed, once they understood the landscape, they were great at doing research against the user personas. The team did a good job with market landscaping; they laid out our competitors and how to convert our solution into a transformative experience.

Our development team had some technical challenges that weren't obvious to me when we started the project. I understood UXReactor would provide everything our developers needed, such as converting Figma to HTML, but that wasn't the case.

Be narrower and more profound in what you're trying to achieve. While you should still paint the bigger picture, your project should be focused. We took a couple of months to narrow down the project and should have done that from the beginning.

I’m the VP of product development at a data analytics company. We’re the leader in software-defined storage focused on delivering highly performant and available block file and object solutions. Software-defined storage allows customers to leverage heterogeneous solutions, bringing them all together. It presents a single storage interaction to customers’ applications.

Our organization was moving into a new category and needed to get into the space that’s still becoming a commoditized business. We were looking to innovate the stack in the area of analytics and insights to launching a new cloud-based service to provide analytics on customers, storage infrastructure driven from instrumentation, and telemetry data that’s running On-Prem.

Conceptually, we knew what we wanted in terms of future specs and the type of analytics we wanted to present to the customer. We engaged UXReactor with our overall concepts. In the kickoff meeting, we went through all the customer journeys. We did this by stepping through the customer need statements as well as building out personas and customer empathy. Then, our teams walked through journey maps across the board.

The team consisted of a design and research lead (Sarah), a researcher, an interaction designer, and a visual designer.

We had a running between three different design firms. UXReactor had a lot of the bells and whistles we were looking for. We did have some previous history with the founder of UXReactor as well.

We invested a little under $1 million.

The engagement was from February 2019–February 2021.

They were pivotal in us building a successful cloud product and changing our organization’s culture in terms of introducing the importance of UX; not to mention the importance of simplicity in products and how we approach engineering in future developments.

They were extremely flexible in terms of plugging into our process and four-week sprint cycles. Their team was always available for anything we needed. We used project boards as well as held daily sync-ups, design sessions, and review sessions multiple times a week.

The biggest thing is the importance of UX and driving that in. It’s critical to have that level of credibility come in from an outside firm. We don’t know what we don’t know until someone comes and shows it to us. UXReactor is an expert in their field. They helped change the thought process we have at our organization.

No, nothing comes to mind.

It’s all about the level of engagement and effort you put into it. If you’re heavily invested and care about that space, they’re going to deliver or exceed the expected results you have.

I'm the president and CEO of an online dispute resolution company based in California.

We brought in UXReactor to improve the interaction and visual design of our new platform, CREK ODR. The functionality in the platform is strong, but the UX is weak because it was just thrown together by the developers. We needed an expert eye to help us take it to the next level.

We wanted to make CREK ODR easier to understand and use. People come to us to provide an easy way to conduct and participate in disputes, and we want to make an easy to use experience for them.

I previously worked with Satyam, one of UXReactor’s co-founders, at PayPal and I have followed the company's progress since then. In fact, I had co-founded a prior company called Modria and Modria was UXReactor’s first paying client. Needless to say, UXReactor and I have a long history together.

UXReactor assigned a project lead who took care of all project management aspects, and kept things on track and on time. They presented a 3-week plan, and delivered a full readout by the end of it as planned.

UXReactor’s team consisted of 4 team members - a project lead, 2 interaction designers, and 1 visual designers.

We received great user feedback since we’ve released the product. The team had picked up on issues we didn’t see or were blindsided by, all of which would have led to poor user experiences, satisfaction, engagement, or retention.

Very efficient. They came into our meetings well prepared and ready to listen. They asked good questions that helped us understand what we wanted better. The was zero churn in our interactions -- they are pros, so they know what to ask and when.

The thoroughness of their work was second to none. I was very impressed with how comprehensive their readout of design issues and improvements were. In addition, they identified design issues and provided us with a scoring mechanism that objectively assessed the design health of our platform.

We’re a young platform, and we're just starting to grow revenue, so hopefully we'll have the resources to do another deeper engagement with them soon so we can find where else we can improve value to our end users. But I found the insight they delivered to be invaluable and I'll be on the lookout for another opportunity to work with them soon.

We’re a relatively young startup working in the API security niche of cybersecurity. We’re building an enterprise cybersecurity product. I’m a co-founder of the company, and I run the product and engineering team.

Being a young startup, we initially built our own UI and product features. We quickly realized that we needed to spend some time and resources on refreshing the UI/UX of the entire product.

The project scope was to do some user research and combine that with our existing feature set in order to refresh the UX and visual design.

We had a total of five people working on UXReactor’s side, including a project lead, visual designers, a product manager, and several engineers. I led the project alongside our director of engineering, who was responsible for implementing the UI.

A contact in my network referred them to me. They worked with UXReactor and were extremely satisfied. I evaluated two companies in total.

We worked with UXReactor between November 2019–April 2020.

We’ve released all of UXReactor’s work into our product. We’re using the same design for both our free community tool and the enterprise product we offer. Numerous users and customers have appreciated how simple and easy the visual design is to navigate.

The project lead really helped. I was taking care of a lot of other things, so I appreciated getting weekly updates from them. They detailed the work they did and then outlined the next items on the list. They brought up potential roadblocks in advance, making sure we’d still meet deadlines.

They had a methodical, proven process for going through some of the visual designs. Secondly, I really liked their visual designers. They surprised me multiple times with very nice interpretations of what the product should look like.

We achieved our goals, so I don’t have any criticisms for UXReactor.

UXReactor is well-prepared for any UX or visual design engagement. My only comment is that, the better prepared the client comes, the better the outcome will be. They let us know what we’d need once the engagement started, including a feature set of the products and an introduction to the company. We gave them all of that information, so we were able to start running from day one.

Blume Global is a worldwide leader in supply chain visibility and logistics software. My role is the Director of UX.

We hired UXReactor to give us a thorough rethinking of the User Experience so far. We wanted to leverage current best practices for elevating the experience. It is a complex process that was in dire need of simplification.

To increase completion rates for any flow in the creation of a business object; to gain greater visibility, throughout the platform, of a container and/or shipment; to foster consistency of experience across the suite of products.

The main criteria for selecting UXReactor was their familiarity in solving complex problems for enterprise software with elegant solutions. Their ability to empathize with the user and keep them at the center of the product development process would give us an unparalleled business advantage.

UXReactor was asked to create a net new experience for an experimental concept. They owned all aspects of design starting from a discovery kick-off to the final deliverable, a clickable visual prototype. The engagement also involved creating a unified framework that could bring 5 different products into 1 single framework.

There was a team leader that became our primary contact; she was a UX Strategist. Then we also had several Interaction Designers and a Visual Designer. For the research, we had a Senior Researcher. Rounding out the team was insight and direction from a principal of the firm, the Chief eXperience Officer.

The work that UXReactor completed for us became the de facto eXperience we leveraged as we sought to redesign the existing product and complete any new features. There work was instrumental in elevating the thinking of the in-house UX Designers and Product teams. We could not have traveled as far and as fast as we were able without their framework and solid deliverables.

The workflow is best described as: seamless. They became an extension of our team and embedded themselves in a way that allowed us to incorporate their thinking without losing a beat in our delivery.

Their process is rock-solid; it goes far beyond design to really look at the ecosystem of the business in total: from the various personas to the onboarding of new users complete to those that have been using the system for a considerable amount of time.

This is a hard question to answer since I became such a fan of their work. If I were pressed to think of a certain factor, it would be how they could simplify their communication in a way that can quickly describe their business impact for the C-suite. For someone in my position, I’d like to have the reasons crafted to readily justify why I hired UXReactor.