Shugar

UX and UI design, as part of a team of two designers working alongside a developer and a project manager. Design decisions were shared.

Shugar collects Italian software houses in one place, so they can be searched, filtered and compared. Until now that information wasn't gathered anywhere, and finding a development partner happened mostly through personal contacts.

Software houses can be filtered by city, service and name, and each one has a profile with the information a client would otherwise have to go looking for company by company.

The main design question was how much to show before someone starts searching, since the value of a directory depends on how quickly it answers the question people arrive with.

Services became the primary filter. From experience, that's the first thing a potential client wants to know, ahead of size or location, so services sit at the top of the filtering and also light up on the cards of the software houses that offer them. The answer appears in the results themselves rather than after opening a profile.

The initial database was built by scraping publicly available data, which gets the platform started but produces uneven results. A software house describing itself is always more accurate than a description assembled from the outside.

Ranking is what closes that gap. More complete profiles rank higher, which gives software houses a concrete reason to claim their page and fill it in properly. The platform gets accurate first-hand data, and people searching get better answers to the questions they came with.