Innovation Alpha

The product

Innovation Alpha turns fragmented patent, litigation, and product data into a readable signal of a company’s strength. I was the only designer on it, and I owned the product from research through the design system underneath it: research, information architecture, interaction design, and data visualization.

Research

I interviewed stakeholders and subject-matter experts across investing, analysis, and law. I synthesized what I heard into three personas, and their real objectives became the benchmark every design decision was tested against.

I also partnered with researchers to create the COR framework (Coverage, Opportunity, Resilience). It gave a sprawling analytical model a single vocabulary a user could learn once and read anywhere in the product.

Design

I designed the information architecture, interaction model, and data visualizations in direct partnership with engineers.

I built and owned Armory, the component design system the product was assembled from. Each component lived in its own file, so a single designer could maintain it and extend it quickly. After the spinout it was adopted by additional product teams at Moat Metrics as the shared foundation for everything they shipped.

The spinout

When Innovation Alpha became an independent company, I restructured its information architecture for a standalone product and rebranded the live application without disrupting the users already working in it.

What I learned

In moderated usability sessions, I watched subject-matter experts work in the product to see which signals they relied on to reach a judgment. They trusted established industry terminology over the proprietary vocabulary we had introduced, including our own COR score.