Shaping the inorigo® Platform

Overview

My journey with the inorigo® platform started in 2018. Back then, I was working for Topp AB, and we were asked to provide a design system for inorigo® – an advanced data platform owned by Ortelius AB. Little would I know that what started as an intense eight-week project would become my main occupation for the next 6 years.

When the pandemic hit about a year later, I, along with many of my colleagues, was laid off. Ortelius, however, was looking for someone to manage their brand-new design system and help implement it. And after all, who was better suited for the job?

In the following years, I oversaw the platform’s design overhaul and worked on various projects for Ortelius clients. IKEA, Peab, and Tetra Pak, to name a few.

Fast forward to 2023, Ortelius and Inorigo decided to go their separate ways while remaining partners. Ortelius would focus on business consulting and data modeling, utilizing the inorigo® platform, while Inorigo would develop and provide the software, custom solutions, and the platform itself.

As Inorigo was reborn as a new company, it also needed a new identity and brand. I was offered the opportunity to take on the role of Creative Director, shaping Inorigo’s new identity while continuing to serve as the company’s lead UX designer.

Balancing both roles was sometimes challenging, but with only about a dozen employees, it was necessary to sit on more than one chair. Even though Inorigo’s clients included large multinational companies, the company itself operated much like a start-up at that time.

Challenges

Working with experts

The user group for the inorigo® platform was unlike any other I’ve worked with previously. These were not your casual end users, but rather a mix of domain experts, developers, and information architects. Many of the most frequent users worked in-house at Ortelius, and some of the most advanced users were the actual developers of Inorigo.

This meant I had a direct, daily dialogue with the core users, but I also had to reconcile the fact that these people were often more knowledgeable about the subject than I was – and had very specific, sometimes complex needs. I am not a developer, nor do I know the ins and outs of business modeling (though I must say I’ve learned a lot since I started working with inorigo®).

Providing the foundation, not the product

Another challenge with designing a platform is that you don’t always have control over the final output. One feature of the platform is a tool for building custom web applications tailored for very specific use cases.

These apps are typically designed by business experts and knowledge workers at Ortelius or some of Inorigos’ partners, not necessarily by people with “design skills”. Rather than providing the app design itself, the task became about providing tools that facilitate the creation of user-friendly apps through components, smart grids, documentation, and guidelines.

An example of an inorigo® application. These web solutions are custimizable and can be themed to fit with the clients brand and environment.

Unique Problems

UI design and UX have been somewhat commoditized today. With design libraries, patterns, best practices, design systems, AI, and an online knowledge base, it’s easier to design beautiful, user-friendly products and services than ever. With inorigo®, however, I constantly faced unique and unexplored challenges.

Take, for example, the Data Grid. A spreadsheet component to input and edit data. On the surface, it is not unlike Excel or Google Sheets. But when you pair this with a graph database with complex relations and nesting, you add an entirely new dimension. There were no existing answers how to do this, and we arrived at a working solution only through rigorous research and testing.

The Data Grid tool resembles a Excel workbook at a glance, but its supports input data at diffrent levels of the model and can be dynamically populated by filter and queries.

Tools & Modules

inorigo® consists of over a dozen different specialized tools of various complexity. These range from data modeling and integration software to user management and data visualization.

Some examples of various tools and modules of the inorigo® platform that I’ve designed.

The Metagraph Builder

The Metagraph Builder is one of the core software modules of inorigo®. It is the tool you use to design your model. However, when I started, there was no visual representation of the model, and the tool’s predecessor was bloated, user-unfriendly, and not web-based. The tool’s modernization was absolutely necessary, but it came with many challenges. With 10+ years of legacy and countless projects and solutions developed with the old tool, there was resistance and opinions both internally and externally.

Despite this, a project was greenlit to create a prototype, though the team would be kept to a minimum.

I was determined that this new tool shouldn’t just be a direct port of the previous version, leaving the legacy behind. That meant scaling back on stuff and rethinking the structure from the ground up. The focus should be on improving the workflow and working with the model visually.

Together with the lead developer, we created a proof of concept within a year. This MVP version was well-received by our users and stakeholders and has now become the centerpiece of the platform.

The Metagraph Builder may seem daunting at first, with its many panels and information density. The toolbar, together with shortcuts, makes it easy to toggle panels and customize the workspace to the current task.

Icons, icons, and more icons

I am no stranger to icons. Early in my career, dating back to 2004, one of my first jobs was to help design Sony Ericsson’s icons. Since then, I’ve designed countless icons for countless projects, and I frankly enjoy doing so.

inorigo® is a very icon-heavy platform. There’s everything from minuscule, monochrome, and abstract model icons – to large, colorful icons depicting the platform’s tools. When I started, there was no consistency or thought about when, where, or how to use the icons, which were typically in bitmap format.

Scalable icons are now part of the inorigo® design system, and there’s an ever-growing number of icons for different purposes.

A sample of icons created for different purposes: Presentation icons for various use cases and domains. Toolbar icons for the functions in the platform’s tools. Icons for the inorigo® platform suite. Model and system icons for UI components and information models.

By leading both product design and brand identity, I realized it would be possible to create a more coherent identity across channels. Management liked what they saw, which led me to create the new visual identity and brand book and to take on the role of creative director.

Excerpts from the Brand Guidelines, which live on the company’s SharePoint – another project which I was the driving force behind.