AmberPoint was a startup with a technology for monitoring web services—software components which make their data available to other software components using http to communicate. At that time, web services were coming into their own, but companies couldn't use them for major enterprise applications because of the lack of adequate monitoring technology, and AmberPoint was one of the first-generation competitors looking to change that. AmberPoint saw a superior user experience as a key differentiator for them, so they asked Cooper for elegant interaction design plus mentoring for their own internal design team.
The solution
We defined an elegant, readable, high-density information display for their entry-level product that fit on a single screen and could be implemented in Flash.
Full disclosure: I relied heavily on the AmberPoint team's domain expertise to get the details right, and one of the AmberPoint team members was responsible for the interface illustrations. But the fundamental design for the graphs and the interaction solution that made it possible to put everything on a single screen was my work.
What's coolThe client implemented the product, AmberPoint Express, exactly as designed, the solution became a major Cooper case study, and the product won a “world class product” award which cited how “its Web console is thoughtfully designed and intuitive.”
Little trace of this project remains today, but the Internet Archive reveals footprints:
