Instantly

Instantly is a powerful market research tool that allows anyone to create user-friendly surveys and distribute them to targeted audiences. Peter Novak, a long-time collaborator and brilliant information architect took a job there several years ago, and invited me to oversee the user experience design.

The intensity and depth of interaction that the site avails provided me with a continuous stream of interesting design challenges. For instance, how could I make it easy for a user to ask married residents of Wisconsin under the age of 50 to rank three package designs in order of which they found most appealing, display real-time survey results, then allow them to make a pie chart that breaks the responses down by gender. It may not sound sexy, but it’s the kind of stuff an interface designer can really sink his teeth into.

Instant.ly was acquired by Survey Sampling International a few years back, most likely because they couldn’t keep their hands off my nice color palette and thin-line icons.