Chaos Sumo (now called Chaos Search) is one of our retainer clients, so our work with them is ongoing. They have recently raised their series A funding of $9M and a delightful user interface and experience certainly played a key role.
Overview
Chaos Sumo reached out after receiving their seed money in early 2016. Their new approach to Big Data management was refreshing, but the user interface was a bit complicated and one that only tech-savvy developers could fully appreciate. They wanted a brand, a website, and a product that all types of users could enjoy and quickly find value in.
NOTE: CHAOSSUMO is now CHAOSSEARCH.IO
Branding
01
The name ChaosSumo stemmed from the idea of "Wrestling the Chaos of big data". The circles of the icon represent the chaos of big data that form a “sumo” when “wrestled” properly.
02
The font used for the logo is a customized version of Brandon Grotesque. The geometric shapes of the font, especially the “O’s” pair well with the circles in the sumo wrestler.
Typography
Primary Colors
Secondary Colors
The Prototyping Process
During the prototyping process, the goal was to quickly create ideas that the developers (the primary users at the time) could provide feedback on. Once we had a better understanding of how the back end functionality worked, we were able to determine that the app had 4 primary objectives for the users to complete: Discover, Query, Organize, Analyze. Getting the users to understand this and guiding them through the process was our main definition of success.
Original design layout when Straton first partnered with ChaosSumo.
Notes after getting feedback from the developers.
This is the initial stages of guiding the users through all 4 steps.
More sketches to determine the best user flow.
While there were 4 core steps in the process, there were still plenty of obstacles to overcome within each step. Here, we are walking the user through creating and organizing their files into virtual buckets.
After getting the initial round of feedback, we put our sketches into a clickable prototype with enough emphasis on UI to get the point across.
User Interface
Next up was establishing the UI and making sure there was a cohesive look and feel with both the product and the website. This is always a fun step for us (and our clients) as we see all our hard work come to life. The UI is a critical part of the user experience and we wanted to make sure this really made ChaosSumo stand out like the cutting edge tech company that they are.
Product Demo
Things have progressed a bit since this initial demo, but you can scrub to the 1:18 mark to get a feel of the workflow.
The Website
Big Data and Smart Object Storage can quickly become complicated and messy. We wanted the website to be clean and minimal (with a tiny bit of playfulness) to show how ChaosSumo could make managing that mess less complicated.
Conclusion
Feedback from investors and collaborators has been positive -- including our favorite kind of feedback: referrals to new clients.