Curio - environmental analytics platform
My role: Head of design & product management
My role: Head of design & product management
www.curio-eco.com is a software platform for environmental monitoring and analytics.
It is used by local government agencies, NGOs and commercial companies for managing urban ecosystems and wide-scale landscape management projects. It also provides a suite of freely available tools for educating and involving public communities in the preservation of their local environment.
It is used by local government agencies, NGOs and commercial companies for managing urban ecosystems and wide-scale landscape management projects. It also provides a suite of freely available tools for educating and involving public communities in the preservation of their local environment.
The current Curio platform was created over 3 years and included the development of a series of technologies under contract to the European Space Agency (ESA).
I was involved in the project from the very beginning. Its shape, from business goals to user experience, was guided throughout by the results of user and customer research and business analysis.
Early mappings of proposed product architecture and the relationship of product areas to the customer value chain
Making tools that are easy to use
A central goal in creating Curio was to make tools that were easy and enjoyable to use.
For enterprise level customers, existing tools in the domain were often poorly implemented in terms of both ease of use and available functionality. Those that provided a better range of functionality required significant levels of training to learn. Curio provided well-designed tools, tailored to the job in hand and with a simple learning curve for users. In order to successfully achieve this, the development cycle leaned heavily on user-led iterations.
In feature definition and development, my preference is to quickly reach the simplest testable model. Descriptions, needs hierarchies, workshops, user-tests, sketches, wireframes and designing-in-code are all methods that are hit repeatedly in a cycle.
Wide-ranging user types on a single platform
A significant design challenge of this project was how to deliver tools to such a wide range of user and customer types within a single platform.
Curio is used by planners and policy makers at citywide scales as well as managers of more localised assets, right the way down to educators and community volunteers.
