Attivio

Over the course of 5 months, Thinktiv helped Attivio articulate, create and deploy its new brand. Essentially starting from scratch, Thinktiv worked with the executives to refine and describe their vision of the company and products. To gain a shared understanding with the team, we used our in-house brand process we call Brand Articulation. It captures key stakeholder and market information in a concise and easily digestible fashion.

Once the verbal position was sound, we transformed it into a visual brand through a combination of typography, color and pattern. Attivio’s goal was to visually remain fresh and true to its startup roots, but also compete at an enterprise level. This was achieved by creating a technical, but approachable mark that embodied the spirit of the technology; multiple threads, facets and concepts coming together in a complex yet controlled way.

One we had final executive buy-in, we created a formal style guide for the brand; this held not only the key elements but their proper use and display. From this document we created a wide range of supporting collateral from motion graphics to trade show booths.

Attivio knew the best way to take advantage of their new brand was to ensure all their content and press releases lined up to the launch of a new website. Most critically, the website had to feature their own search product. Once we wrapped the first stage of the brand program, we moved directly into web development.

The biggest challenge of any large scale corporate website is content. We focused first on organizing the content into a manageable architecture. This architecture was reflected in wireframes which were used to begin development against. This parallel path greatly reduced our development time by allowing us to edit content in the CMS (Joomla) while we worked on the overall visual design.

The visual design component of the site was a relatively quick task as we had very diligently created a very complete styleguide. As we had executive buy-in from the beginning we could concentrated on the development of additional visual aids and animations for the site.

Our final hurdle was to integrated Attivio’s Simple Search product into the site. We created custom modules for Joomla to interact and “talk to” Simple Search. Now, Attivio could show the power and flexibility of Simple Search in a custom CMS deployment.

We’ve helped Attivio on a number of fronts in regard to its product design: Visual Interaction Design, Product Strategy and Front end development. The majority of our time has been focused on its showcase product, Simple Search. Simple search had a number of challenges associated with it. From a visual design perspective It had to simultaneously act as a sales tool for Attivio, but be visually flexible enough to accommodate another brand’s style when used as their engine of choice. Inherently, because the product was combining the best of search and business intelligence, it needed to be clean, easy to use and flexible in its presentation of data. And, finally as a tool for developers, it needed to accommodate rich help and code snippets for easy deployment.

In addition to the Simple Search UI we’ve helped Attivio with their more advanced UI efforts including their administration UI’s built in Flex. While these UI’s don’t have the complexity of brand to manage, they are challenged with informationally rich environments and need to be friendly and easy to use.