Data Dictionary Web App
Syndetic - Lead Design, Freelance
2019
Syndetic hired me to design an experience for sharing and managing datasets inside and outside of an organization.
About the Product
Syndetic is an early stage startup trying to bring to the cloud, services around managing sets of data. Specifically, Syndetic has set out to provide their customers with tools to manage data dictionaries across organizations, as well as share data outside of companies to serve the big data industry.
Users Main Job Responsibilities
Organize fields of data into a dictionary.
Write metadata for data fields and dictionaries.
Share data internally and externally.
Manage permissions of users.
The Design
Discovery
Working with the founders of Syndetic I started wire framing their initial assumptions about how their potential customers wanted to view data in dictionaries, how they wanted to comprise the data fields in those dictionaries, and how they wanted to annotate that data.
Approach
After the founders had some time to connect with the potential users we learned that our initial assumptions about their mental model of a data dictionary was a bit off and had to restructure the relationship between a dictionary and the data fields it contains, as well as the relationship between an annotation and a data field.
Conclusion
After working with the founders of Syndetic on this project the company moved on to be accepted into Y Combinator’s accelerator program.
“Product designers have the distinct challenge of being asked to criticize the core of a company - its products - in the pursuit of making them better. Allison manages to do this with respect for the decisions that were made before her, respect for the people who made those decisions, and at the same time the utmost conviction in her recommendations. This is such a rare combination. Anyone would be lucky to have Allison on their team.“
— Allison Swihart, Co-Founder of Syndetic