Ibbit data management system
Overview
Ibbit helped businesses and government organizations manage not only their internal databases, but selectively and easily publish that data to their websites, apps or other platforms. Ibbit was a commercial software product, owned and supported by Subvert that was first released in 2011 and grew to support the needs of a variety of customers across Northern Canada.
Strategy
For a lot of companies, their public-facing websites are maintained with a standalone Content Management System (CMS) while their internal databases run on multiple other technologies. All too often, these systems don’t talk to one another and so a hefty amount of duplicate work is created to keep them all up-to-date. Some companies can afford to connect and sync these systems while others cannot: Ibbit was built to lower that cost and bring this business advantage to more organizations.
In the beginning
Ibbit began life as a simple way for one of our clients to manage their internal records database and publish some of that information to a website. I designed that first version of the interface and information architecture to suit the specific needs of this one-off project. Over time, and as we used Ibbit on more projects, new features were added, usability enhancements were made and Ibbit’s footprint grew larger and larger.
Reboot
In 2014, we decided Ibbit’s ASP.NET code should be re-written from scratch, giving me the opportunity to re-think the visual design and information architecture. A modular design system was created and applied to a prototype that the team tested along with our customers. After we felt confident enough in this new direction, existing customers’ data was transitioned to the updated version. I continued to iterate on the shared design system, making core tweaks that would improve everyone’s user experience at once.
Today
At its peak, Ibbit fulfilled the needs of customers who used it to consult with citizens, publish news stories, host a busy job board, share historical photographs, distribute spatial data, accept orders and serve up on-demand downloads. In other words, Ibbit did a lot of different things for a variety of different organizations, demonstrating that the interface design I created was flexible, adpatable and highly scalable.