Gearcheck
Branding and UX/UI design for the simplest equipment management system for height works.
2020
Project first completed at Applifting. We’re now working on the 2nd iteration – that’s why you might see slightly different visuals here and there.
Gearcheck is a new service for height works, allowing multiple stakeholders to easily inspect and track equipment, log incidents and request gear inspections. In other words, it’s a product for a focused, specific niche. Created by a smart founder who knows very well what he wants to build, but also has great respect for the design process.
We managed to deliver a simple brand guide and user interface design in less than two weeks of work. This was one of the most interesting projects I’ve had the chance to work on.
First step, uniquely, was to create a brief brand for the product – something that often has low priority with startups. We set ourselves a tight timeframe of only a few days and revisions, which in the end gave us a nice enough brand, without eating up a huge amount of budget.
The scope for the brand was company values, name, visual identity and a design guide.
For the logo mark, I combined the letter G with a carabiner into a simple but memorable brand mark with an industrial, possibly timeless feel. Very etchable onto things, too.
Gearcheck runs as a web app. That allowed us to collaborate on design changes with the developers pretty quickly. And we already had the brand, so the design direction was clear – confident, precise, safe, simple.
A lot of the work was understanding all the possible paths of the user through Gearcheck, finding common patterns and creating a coherent and functional system. For example, the Equipment Detail screen, which is where users would spend most of the time, needed to cover specific funcionality for different stakeholder types. This was amplified by the fact that the app is used in high demanding environments and so can’t afford to fail, or be misunderstood.
In the end, the project was slowed down because of COVID, so thorough usability testing with the target group is still to be done.
