Diffblue
Marketing, branding and product design of the Diffblue platform - an AI startup based in Oxford.Diffblue Deeptest
Diffblue was my first entry into digital product design after working at Oxford University Press in the UK for 9 years. I was looking to expand my skills and working at Diffblue was a perfect start to a new chapter of my career. I joined them when they were a small startup working in Oxford, with no clear brand identity and no design direction, so I could start from the ground up. I started off designing their brand bible and marketing materials, before learning all that I could about platform and webapp design - using Sketch and Zeplin when was popular at the time.
Initially, I focused on the design of their first major product - Diffblue Deeptest. This AI powered webapp was a revolutionary tool to help developers write tests for their code - usually a very time consuming process.
The Diffblue menagerie. The owl (2nd from the left) was the only asset I inherited when I started at Diffblue. I thought it would be fun to expand the menagerie and have other characters for other products and features within the Diffblue product family.
When I started working on this platform, there was very much the mentally of “we are our users”, so they thought this was a big advantage. From the start I was always skeptical of this mindset. Yes the platform was aimed at skilled developers, but the UX should always be intuitive and clearly understood by anyone.
I worked on the Deeptest platform for about a year until the company received a massive round of funding, at which time they expanded quickly, and I was given much more to do.
I’ve never been shy of taking on new and different work, whatever that may be. With Diffblue’s new round of funding, there was a lot of new work - I created a new website, blog, animations and began working on their secondary platform - Diffblue Playground. After the funding, Diffblue also moved to a bigger office in Oxford, and I was tasked with helping in the interior redesign of this massive new space.
I learned a lot during my 2 years at Diffblue - mostly about how to work with a different kind of colleague to what I was used to in print design. Developers are much more inquisitive and keen to iterate their products, and to this day I enjoy the process of working closely and collaboratively with developers to get the best results.
I ultimately decided to move to Trust Power and work on the Loop app to further my career in app and UX design.
As usual, I always try and inject a bit of fun into my designs wherever possible.
The next product I worked on was Diffblue Deeptest, Diffblue’s Saas offering. I worked very closely with a small dev team in order to bring this product to life.