Socratic
Real insights,
faster delivery.

Role  —————————

Strategy
User research
Branding
Product design
Website Design

Collage of various elements from the Socratic platform, including task board cards, trend analysis, a timeline, and data visualizations.

The Challenge 

Socratic is reimagining task management by integrating performance intelligence with real-time 
data to guide daily decisions (and superior results), showing teams how well they worked and why.

They tapped Craft at a very early stage of their business to help conceptualize, design, and launch the Socratic product and brand.

Three wireframe ideas of different ways to present data.

The Process 

Socratic’s founders knew they needed a fantastic design and user experience with a cohesive brand unifying the overall design. With this vision in mind, they turned to Craft to make it real.

Creating distinctive, strong design starts with listening — both for clear direction and subtext. With Socratic, Craft was able to gather both from collaborative conversations with the co-founders, delivering brand, product, and UX design directions to iterate upon together.

Using Craft’s holistic, product-led approach to the user experience and brand, Socratic arrived at a comprehensive design system outlining standards, guidelines, and components for both product and brand across every aspect of Socratic as an entity.

Mockup of two screens on top of the Socratic logo. Right screen shows the trends dashboard view where a user can monitor the health of work across any number of teams or projects, the left screen shows a detail view of the demand trend.
Screen mock-up of workstream engineering task board view and an example of the platform in both dark and light modes.

The data, distilled

In its current iteration, the Socratic product experience allows teams to see immense amounts of data in a streamlined way, empowering product teams to understand how they are performing and areas for improvement.

Collage of various trend analysis elements from Socratic, including a tool tip and illustration of Socrates.
Screen design that shows the task detail view.
Task cards and their various card states such as idle, blocked, or a list
Some of the UI elements, specifically showcasing icon library.

Bold Minimalism

The brand approach supports the product direction by leveraging a minimal, primarily monochromatic look and feel with strong color accents that highlight the most important information that needs attention.

Angled grid of images displaying Socratic's product design system — including colors, logos, and patterns

The product is your brand

Even in the earliest days of an MVP, users are scrutinizing your offering and making decisions about what your brand stands for.

To give clients like Socratic the best possible chance of measuring up with their first build, Craft designs the product with the brand in mind (and vice versa).

That means sharing the collective experience of Team Craft by making the what, why, and how of crucial design decisions clear to stakeholders and demonstrating the ways these choices might play out as your company grows.

Craft has an informalness born of confidence. Folks like Jeremy and Sandy convey they've done this before. They know how to get from general concepts or vague notions into the specifics.

Brad Hipps, Socratic