InnerWorkings is a Fortune 500 company offering mega-scale printing to large companies. If you need 500,000 copies of your annual report in two weeks, InnerWorkings taps its large network of printers around the country to print the job, distributing the workload around the network as necessary. Costs are kept remarkably low because printing equipment capabilities are not squandered: small-run jobs are printed on small-run presses; two-color jobs are not printed on equipment capable of six.

InnerWorkings has sophisticated software and a large department of order-takers and account executives who use a complex internal system. They also have a customer-facing store that allows customers (typically an office manager) to order items directly. InnerWorkings asked me to redesign both the internal and customer-facing tools to be clearer, easier to use, and more visually pleasing.

This is the key system that account managers and customer support personnel spend their entire days using. This user community had a long list of complaints about the UI, including eyestrain and difficulty finding the one field on a screen they needed to change. The CTO asked me to make surgical changes that would help the users without slowing them down. I restricted my interventions to: calmer background colors, wayfinders in small doses of saturated color, making critical buttons easier to locate, and only occasionally moving elements around the page to reduce wasted real estate or to follow task ordering. The end result is not what I'd call beautiful but it is much easier on the eye and it was greeted by the user community with enthusiasm. I actually love this kind of work because it's a game with myself — how little can I change to effect a big improvement?