Designing Dreamler by Jean Pichot

In the beginning of May we released a first public version of Dreamler, a collaboration tool that utilizes the visual aspects of real-time multiplayer games to help people achieve a higher degree of efficiency and engagement in projects.

My first encounter with Dreamler was a year ago in May, as a freelance designer. My focus was creating animations to explore new functionalities and how these could work within the existing interface. Coding had begun a year earlier (in April 2013) and a lot of structural elements were in place, which provided room to think creatively about visual features and user interaction.

My background is in motion design and up to that point I hadn’t been exposed to much of the workflow of software design. Based in Stockholm and Gothenburg, Dreamler is a small company with a handful of talented developers from various backgrounds. Having liked the experience, I joined the team shortly after.

One of our goals during development was to strengthen the visualization of projects and this has become a key principle in how we approach both the user experience as well as the design of elements within Dreamler.

To this end, we’ve been working on a formal visual language to describe projects and all the tools that go into seeing them through.

In our project management software, we wanted to make the project planning process truly visual and collaborative. This is how we designed Dreamler.

About the author

Jean Pichot is a designer currently living in Gothenburg, Sweden. His background includes 15+ years of design, direction, and animation for broadcast and commercial projects, recently focusing on user experience and interface design at Dreamler.