Cake Financial

As Cake Financial's founders were gathering funding and developing their back-end systems, they approached Method to help them create an interface for their product - a financial information site using social networking at a deeper level than had been tried before. On this site users would share not only advice, but their actual investment portfolios; while sophisticated modeling systems leveraged the aggregated data to provide unique views on the financial market. Cake's task for Method was to create an elegant, eye-catching interaction design to engage their audience. In order to understand the requirements for this new type of service, Method followed a design process that included internal testing of approaches and assumptions. We created a work plan that allowed for user testing of alternate site concepts, with each focusing on a different positioning of the site's purpose as well as a different leading feature set and new ideas for visualizing the site's financial data. Method recruited target users of the site and led them through the site's features, gathering information about their attitudes toward features including sharing their portfolio and looking at others' portfolios. Through this research, Method - along with Cake Financial - gathered invaluable information for honing not only the site's features but also the company's business model. Method then continued with interaction design, specifying features for the site's major pages. The final deliverable provided a description of a compelling - and user-validated - service that Cake could show its investors, as well as a blueprint Cake could use to build the site.

Method

Brands have no boundaries. We can bring your brand to life on any existing platform or technology - or develop entirely new ones.

TED stands for technology, entertainment, design: a hint at the wide-ranging topics at the heart of this long-running conference hosted each spring in Monterey, California. In 2006, TED approached Method to help them bring the experience and content of the conference online.
TED Conferences
As media began its move onto the web, boxee saw an opportunity: to bring all that content - music, photography, and video, from both commercial and personal libraries - directly to a user's monitor or television, paired with a full set of social networking features.
boxee