Dave Malouf · Design Leader
  1. 01Managed Cloud Vision
  2. 02New Digital Studio
  3. 03Mundane made easy
  4. 04Rich Internet Apps
  5. 05SCAD Re-Designed
Design 04Platform · Research

Rich Internet Apps bring  desktop design to the web.

Three years: two of evangelism, one of deep research and redesign of a complex legacy platform. The Virtual Deal Room proved the browser could hold desktop-class work.

Org
Intralinks
Role
Design lead
Year
3-year program
Discipline
Enterprise platform
Context

Three years in the making.

The Intralinks project was three years in the making. It started with strong evangelism lasting two years and a highly researched re-design of a complex legacy platform for another year.

Over 100 customers were interviewed and/or observed across four major financial and pharmaceutical industry sectors.

Intralinks Virtual Deal Room workspace overview with deal info, key contacts and a what's new list
A portal into a Virtual Deal Room. A collaboration space designed to work the way bankers and lawyers work when running a mergers and acquisitions deal. This is the portal someone on either the buy or sell side lands in — a digital experience that simply wasn't achievable with the tools that came before Intralinks.
Intralinks document repository with a folder tree and an indexed document list
Documents by the thousands. The Deal Room is all about the documents — bankers and lawyers are here to do their due diligence. We took a clumsy drill-down, web-like system and turned it into a robust folder system, augmented with dynamic folders (saved searches) that updated in real time as the repository changed.
Intralinks permissions wizard assigning workspace users and roles to a document
Complex permissions. Buyers can't know their competitors are in the room, and not every buyer has equal privileges to the same information at the same time. Managing and tracking that complexity was the key problem the project had to solve to be successful.
The move
Evangelism is design work

Two of the three years went into making the organization willing to attempt a desktop-class web application at all.

The move
Research at deal scale

100+ interviews and observations across four regulated sectors set the requirements — not internal assumptions.

The move
Permissions as the product

Who can see what, when, is the deal. Designing that model well was the difference between adoption and failure.

Leadership Principles

How this maps to leadership principles.

  • Think Big: pushing rich internet application patterns onto the web years before it was a settled idea.
  • Customer Obsession: over 100 customers observed across financial and pharmaceutical sectors shaped the redesign.
  • Dive Deep: the hardest surface — permissioning at deal complexity — got the most design attention, not the prettiest one.
  • Earn Trust: two years of evangelism built the internal coalition that made a three-year platform redesign possible.
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Making the mundane and difficult interesting and easy

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Bringing the art forward for a design school’s website