After completing several successful projects for LinkedIn, we were hired to re-imagine one of the most critical parts of the user experience: The Connections page. This page displays your list of connections on LinkedIn and is used by tens of millions of people every day.

The goal of the redesign was to add a way for users to organize and access their connections with a new “tagging” interface. This new feature had to live within a larger set of interactions, such as finding connections by company, location, industry and searching.

Working closely with the product and dev teams, we began by doing a competitive review of existing address book applications. After understanding some of the best practices among them, we created a set of goals for the new interface. It had to provide a “familiar” experience to the leading address books, but also play up the unique strengths of LinkedIn’s innovative product.

Next, we generated several several working prototypes that could be put in front of LinkedIn users. The best concept was then refined, visually styled according to LinkedIn’s nascent style guide, and launched to a small control group of users. User reaction was very positive and some subsequent improvements were made based on feedback from the control group. We’re especially proud of the simple, efficient UI that resulted from this project.

What if you can manage all of your advertising – Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and more – all through a single intelligent system? How should we communicate the benefits of a product like this? What’s the best way to interact (or avoid interaction!) with an “Autopilot” for advertising?

Working closely with the CEO and developers, we completely re-imagined the Vurve product from the home page to the sign-up flow, down to the most detailed settings pages. Our focus was on giving the user the “confidence” to let Vurve manage the advertising, yet provide custom overrides whenever necessary.

In addition to the product page designs, we also created a mobile style for the site so that users would be able to have access to Vurve’s progress in a convenient format.

PayPal was on a mission to improve the user experience for their leading person-to-person online payment product. In addition to making it a “pleasure” to send money online, PayPal wanted to experiment with some new ideas for the product.

To add complexity to the project, PayPal was also in the middle of a site-wide redesign project that would coincide with the launch of this new payment design.

We worked closely with the PayPal team (PM, Developers, Internal Design team, Researchers, etc.) to create a project plan and scope that fit within PayPal’s fast-moving development schedule. For our first phase we led several internal brainstorming sessions with the PayPal team to generate as many ideas as possible. Next, Ramirez Design created visualizations of the best ideas and put them in front of actual customers. Finally, we worked with the PayPal Dev team to create a working prototype and tested it with beta customers in the UK.

During a fly fishing trip on the Sacramento Delta in the Summer of ’09, Frank was hooking some huge striped bass and logging the GPS coordinates on his iPhone. “Shucks,” he thought. “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was an app for that?” After he noticed that the fishing guide pulled out an iPhone to make a call, the seeds of an idea took root.

Frank partnered with his fishing buddy and the Good Fish company was created. We now have over 40,000 downloads of our iPhone and Android apps. Thousands of people use Good Fish to share their catches from all parts of the world.

For years, university libraries have provided discovery systems that were not very convenient for their students. Either the interface was dated, or you had to access several catalog systems for the various collections offered by the library. Why couldn’t library search be as convenient as a typical web search?

Serials Solutions wanted to change all that by creating Summon™; a single, unified searching experience for university libraries.

Serials Solutions hired Ramirez Design to create a user experience that would be powerful, yet simple.

Leveraging our considerable experience with structured search (Yahoo! FareChase, Roost, FanSnap, etc.), we created several interaction models that would be fast and powerful for scholarly research. After initial requirements discussions, we created a prototype that was was used for internal validation and as a way to get directional feedback from potential customers. After the interaction design of the prototype was acceptable, we created the pixel-level design spec and an HTML/CSS template for the alpha product.

Summon has received excellent adoption by university libraries and is on its way to becoming the market leader in that space. It also recently took top honors at the CODiE award ceremony for Best Enterprise Search Solution.

What would you get if you mixed Hollywood-style film entertainment with web-powered social collaboration? This was the idea brought to us in 2009 by the founders of Take180.com. They had the Hollywood network and the technical team in place to create this product, but they needed a design partner who could deliver a user experience that would entice people to participate.

We began by insisting that most of our working sessions take place at Take180′s office in Beverly Hills and updating our wardrobes so that we would fit into the hip LA scene (yes, we sacrifice for our clients like that). After that, it was all business.

We worked with the founders to create several concepts for the critical use cases: Viewing the weekly films, participating in the creation of the films, and sign-up. These concepts were then turned into an interactive prototype which was shown to the key audience segments.

Take180.com has been an internet success story, yielding millions of views, creating several new stars (e.g. fake Tom Cruise) and eventually a purchase by the Walt Disney Company.

Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB) wanted to improve their complex system for course planning, approval and management. The new system had to provide an intricate workflow to support hundreds of graduate students, professors, administrators and other critical resources.

The Stanford GSB hired us to work with their internal PM and development team and lead the user experience design for their new Course Planning System.

Starting from a requirements document written by their lead product manager, we created a list of questions for the various users of the new system. With a series of stakeholder interviews, we validated some of the initial assumptions and discovered some additional ideas, requirements and concerns that we needed to address with the new design.

As usual, we then created an interactive prototype that was first validated by the administrators, then with professors and students. Finally, Ramirez Design provided detailed wireframes and visual specifications for every page the new Course Planning System.

One evening, after reading the same kid’s book to his son for the hundredth time, Frank decided to make a picture book. With a degree in illustration, this should be easy right? But what kind of picture book could you make if you leveraged the power of web-based software? You can have a customizable picture book for every child!

Imagine a funny story about a dog saving Earth from silly space monsters – but it isn’t just any dog. It’s your dog! “How My Dog Saved Earth” by My Picture Book is an iPad app that lets you put your dog in the story.

The Yahoo! Travel team manages a very popular website that lets users research travel locations and book flights, hotels and rental cars. But they wanted to take their UI to the next level. When they bought a travel search company called “FareChase”, they suddenly had a hot “meta search” technology that needed an elegant user interface.

Yahoo! hired Ramirez Design to lead the interaction design for FareChase and provide a vision for the user experience going forward.

Several design concepts for FareChase were explored, but the final design gave users an innovative, faceted interface for searching flights, hotels and rental cars. Yahoo! FareChase delivered a fast, convenient way to search dozens of travel sites (including airline sites as well as travel aggregators) in one easy step.

After several projects with Yahoo! Travel, Yahoo! hired us for other projects including a redesign of their Member Center and a visualization of the entire Yahoo! network that was a collaboration with several other contractors.

Buying and selling old comics online made us huge fans of eBay. So, when eBay asked us to help redesign their Live Auctions application, we jumped at the opportunity. eBay wanted to create 2 applications to support live auctions. First, they needed a simple consumer-facing, bidding interface that would allow people to bid on items in real-time. Second, eBay needed an interface that would be used on the physical auction floor so that the auctioneers can manage the in-person bids with the online bids during the fast-paced auctions.

The first step was to understand and visualize the myriad configurations that auctioneers used to sell items: single items, blocks of items, blocks with priority purchase, individual priced bids, etc. Next, we created an interface that visually grouped the blocks and clearly showed the current item next to a list of upcoming items. Finally, we created a good onboarding experience for bidders who wanted to “just look” before they decided to jump into the bidding.