Hello! I'm a product designer inspired by complex problems and passionate about in-depth systems thinking. I help launch new digital products and establish design systems that deliver valuable human-centered experiences.
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Applied XL
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Applied XL
frog
Senior Experience Designer
18 Weeks
Responsibilities
Hero Flow Design
UI Starter Kit
Value Proposition
Information Architecture
Engineer Collaboration
Summary
Applied XL joined the frogVentures portfolio through a pre-seed stage investment from frog partner Tuesday Capital. As part of the collaboration, the team and I sharpened our understanding of the initial target audience, then designed the core experience for desktop and mobile devices. As a frog team, we operated as an extension of Applied XL’s team, seamlessly integrating into their workflow and resulting in a successful and accelerated launch of a market ready MVP.
View on frog.co
Launching a solution to the information crisis with Applied XL
“It’s more difficult to filter out irrelevant information than to create it,” notes Francesco Marconi, co-founder and CEO of Applied XL. “This means decision-makers are often challenged to find the signal amid the noise in the data critical to their businesses.
Aiming High
Together Applied XL and our frog team developed a platform that combines human perspectives with AI. Using proprietary machine learning and editorially driven algorithms, the Brooklyn-based startup can now analyze millions of data events in real-time to identify the most relevant information, delivering early, contextual, and newsworthy signals to professionals in the industry. Applied XL was built in response to what its founders describe as an “information crisis” triggered by difficulty in distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant data.
The startup was founded by computational journalists formerly of The Wall Street Journal, based at Newlab, a community of entrepreneurs and innovators leveraging transformative technology. Ultimately, their mission is to anticipate disruptions to the health of people, places and the planet so that these can be more readily addressed or even avoided altogether.
The partners identified the life sciences space—specifically, the clinical trials and drug development sector—as an ideal industry to launch into first. We were brought on to turn the company’s vision into an intuitive MVP and successful product launch.
Defining the Value Proposition
Through generative and evaluative qualitative user research, we developed a target customer archetype and clear value proposition that conveyed both functional and emotional value to prospective users, including biotech and pharma operators.
Streamlining visual identity
Applied XL needed an initial visual identity that would enable them to launch quickly and test assumptions in the market. I helped spearhead a Starter UI Kit with light branding elements to leverage in building out their growing product suite.
Establishing Information Architecture
With an ever-growing feature list, Applied XL sought a strategic approach that would invite their users to explore their product capabilities. Both our Design and Strategy teams worked with Applied XL to define the key content types and architecture required for the product—and in the process outlined the overall user experience.
Designing Hero Flows
With a short timeline, we tackled the design of the highest impact and most complex screens while collaborating with Applied XL’s data & engineering team to orchestrate the product as a whole. The result is an intuitive, robust user experience that Applied XL can scale to other verticals and industries.
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Applied XL partnered with leading health and biotech news publisher STAT News to jointly launch its first vertical in life sciences. Within the first month of the product being live, Applied XL converted its first paying customers with an annual subscription of $1,500.
Applied XL subsequently raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Hearst Ventures in March 2022.
Applied XL’s co-founder and CEO had previously engaged with frog when he was AI & Automation co-lead at Associated Press on a project exploring the future of news.
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