Fulcrum | Field Operations Platform
Role: product strategy, product design, branding, marketing design, front-end development, copywriting
Fulcrum allows users to collect data, media, and GPS locations in the field via mobile app, with everything synced to the cloud for centralized access, management, and reporting via the web.
I was an agency of one for the first few years, ultimately growing the team to four designers. We were a tight group, proudly upholding the mantle as the glue between product and engineering.
Fulcrum is a cloud-based platform for field data collection that lets teams use custom-built forms to capture field observations, media, GPS locations, and other structured inputs on mobile devices, with everything synced to a web app for viewing, organizing, and reporting. I joined the team from another internal project just as we unveiled v0.5 at the 2011 GEOINT Symposium, stepping in to elevate the product's visual identity, lead the design of its iOS, Android, and web apps, and establish consistent UX patterns that would form the foundation of the Fulcrum design system in the years that followed.
What follows are some vignettes of a few key contributions I've made to Fulcrum over the years.
App Dashboard
In Fulcrum, an App refers to a custom form, complete with settings, attachments, reports, and automated workflows. Early on, users could view the list of Apps, edit the form schema, and view the App data, but there was no way to get an overview of App-level activity, nor was there a central place to handle administration.
Our goal was to create a way for users to drill into a specific App to get a broader sense of data & activity, as well as provide us a place to hang some other features we had planned like data sharing, workflows, and crowdsourcing admin.
The result was a stickier product (users no longer had to go somewhere else for basic metrics), a more well-rounded web experience for users, and breathing room for our product team to explore the expansion of an App's capabilities.
Some early concepts, notes, and exploration.
Member Onboarding
Fulcrum helps companies of all sizes run better, but it's not a one-man-show kind of product. Inviting and onboarding your team is an early and necessary step to getting up and running. And while our first iteration of the member invite flow worked for smaller outfits, it did not scale well at all.
There was no mass import. The stepper experience felt clunky. Orgs with any scale were spending too much time onboarding and the stepper became error prone and got slower with more people, not faster. We wanted to appeal to larger businesses, so I created a new flow to optimize the experience, adding the ability to mass import a list of team members, assign them a role, administer permissions, and send the invites in message, all in one place.
Establishing an understanding of the core problem can be difficult if we go hi-fi too early. We used fat-marker sketches1 as a way to validate ideas quickly without attaching too much affinity early on toward any particular approach.
[1] Coined in 'Shape Up' by Ryan Singer (2019)
The consolidated & optimized iteration won out over the original "stepper" experience by a 73% margin.
Tour Illustrations
A few years into building and marketing Fulcrum, we kept running into a problem where potential customers had difficulty connecting the dots between our screenshots of our features and what the features actually did. This reduced our potential inbound funnel and put undue pressure on the sales team as a result.
I created a series of illustrations for the Tour section of the marketing site to abstract these concepts, resulting in visuals that were more easy to internalize on first glance. I definitely went out on a limb for a few of these, so I'm grateful to the team for putting their faith in this quirky approach. And it worked. Within two weeks of launch, inbound leads rose by 13%, which clearly signaled the new approach had the desired effect.
It's easy to get caught up in the grind of creating content, assets, buttons, screens, and "experiences", that we forget to look up once in a while and remember this can be fun, too.
Groups
Working with business data comes with the added wrinkle of having to provision the access, visibility, and permissioning of it to each member of the team. in Fulcrum, we had nice boundaries around user roles and permissions, but as we began swimming in Enterprise waters, assigning access to the Apps, Projects, and Map Layers started to show weakness at scale.
Through deep discussions with customers, it became clear we would have to think of a completely new way of performing this work in Fulcrum. The problem couldn't be “enhanced away” by modifying the existing method.
So we designed Groups. It's a classic example of “why didn't we think of this sooner” because of how immediate and overwhelming the response was from customers about the improved experience. This also unblocked quite a few sales conversations with potential enterprise-level prospects who had concerns about scaling in Fulcrum.
Prior to Groups, customers were forced to perform redundant operations in each object to manage access and visibility.