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Print Purchasing Application

ABOUT THIS PROJECt

Print Buyer was a Productivity Software program I created for professionals who buy or broker printing services.  It let them define projects, send requests for quotations to their printing vendors, compare bids, issue purchase orders & client invoices and run a variety of reports.  In short, it let them run their entire operation. 

WHAT I DID ON THIS PROJECT

I played various roles in it’s creation, including Concept Inception, Product Manager, User Experience Designer, Creative Director, Writer & Package Designer

WHAT I LEARNED ON THIS PROJECT

Even if you're a skilled UX Designer with subject matter knowledge, you are not your user. You need to get your concept in front of real users as early as possible - and that means before a line of code is written.  When I launched PrintBuyer, I was an independent Print Broker, and hence a subject matter expert (SME). I was confident that I knew what the program needed to do, and how it should do it.  The software we created was useful and powerful, but ultimately, real life users had their own subtle things they wanted to do differently.  Unfortunately, PrintBuyer was developed before we had the kind of quality prototyping tools that are available today.  If we had prototyped early with real users, it would have been much more successful.