Jackson Fish Market delivers user experience design and development consultancy– for web, iPhone, iPad, and more.

Experience

In three short years, Jackson Fish Market has created and helped to create a number of diverse software projects. Each with its own identity, each with its own audience, and each with its own business model. Jackson Fish Market is available to help you bring your software vision to reality with an emphasis on design, attention to detail, and quality. Click here for some examples of our work or watch our demo reel video:

Brand, Interaction, Aesthetics, Execution

There are four main components of every project. We offer our services a la carte or as a package. You can get in touch with us to help out with any of these areas:

• Brand — Your offering needs to have an identity, genetics, a reason for being. You already know it, but sometimes it’s hard to express it in a way that captures why you really are creating this experience in the first place. We can help deliver everything from a name, to a logo, to an entire brand identity kit with flexible expressions of your logo and related graphics and text for use in multiple contexts and media. This is where we create the emotional identity of your application or service.
  Brand phase deliverables: Name, Logo, Brand Toolkit, Original Art
• Interaction — We start with the basics of identifying the core concepts that your customers will need to understand in order to interact with your software as well as the minimum feature set that will get you out the door and into customers’ hands. Once we’ve defined those concepts in the clearest and simplest terms possible, we use them as the building blocks of your application. We pick 1-3 key scenarios and deliver wireframes for those scenarios. There’s no need to wireframe every screen in your app, but the scenarios must cut broadly across your user experience touching on all of the core concepts and making sure our initial definitions stand the test of a real user interface. This is where we create the skeleton and nervous system of your software user interface.
  Interaction phase deliverables: v1 Feature List, Core Concept Definitions, Top Scenario Wireframes
• Aesthetics — This phase is extra fun. This is where we take the genetics of your brand and brand elements and turn them into specific visual expressions. Then we take those visuals and apply them to the wireframes delivered in the Interaction phase. Your product ‘comes to life’, well… it does on paper anyway. But it’s still exciting nonetheless. This is where you first see exactly what your customers are going to experience.
  Aesthetics phase deliverables: Pixel Perfect Mockups of Key Screens from Wireframes, UI Toolkit, Original Art
• Execution — If we’ve done our jobs correctly, this phase couldn’t be simpler. By now we all should understand why we’re here, what the product is, and what it isn’t. That’s the Brand phase. We have a map of the highest trafficked paths through the application’s user interface. That’s the Interaction phase. And we have a detailed expression of what the user experience will actually be for version 1 of your app. That’s the Aesthetics phase. In execution. We build it. We ship it. Plain and simple. There will be a small portion of this phase that requires us to reevaluate decisions we made in earlier phases. Once you see your designs in code, and get to actually try them, good and bad decisions become apparent quickly. But those are almost always minor optimizations. The real test is putting the software in customer’s hands and seeing what they do with it. And btw, we’re not religious about tools and technology. Whatever gets the job done best and most efficiently is what we choose. This includes: web development, Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET, Flash, Silverlight, iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone, etc.This is where you deliver your web or device user experience to your customers.
  Execution phase deliverables: Source Code, Binaries, Development/Test Environment, Handoff Documentation

Reality

Because we have combined decades of experiences building real software for real people, our designs may be beautiful, but they are always implementable. We know when to push the envelope, and when to be smart about delivering something in a timely fashion as a performant experience. Our heads may be in the clouds sometimes, but our feet are always planted firmly on the ground. Cliche? Yes. True? Also yes. Want more cliches? That’ll cost ya.

What we’re really like. (Really… this is the straight up truth.)

If you work with us you’ll get:

• to work with the principals – Jenny Lam and Hillel Cooperman. We don’t show up for the sales meeting and then palm you off to our junior team once the contract is signed. We’re doing the actual work your project needs.
• the truth. We’ll always tell you what we think. And we’ll always tell you when we don’t know the answer, or when the answer isn’t certain. We also know when to bow to your wisdom. You’re the client after all and are steering the ship.
• quality original creative software design and/or construction.
• a willingness to work with others. We’re always happy to pick up where other teams have left off, or to contribute to the design phase of the project and hand it off to another company for development.
• courtesy, respect, a sense of humor, and a place to hang out in Seattle’s Pioneer Square if you’re ever in the neighborhood. We have snacks too!

If you work with us you won’t get:

• bait and switch. In all software projects, the cost and length of the execution phase cannot be determined with any accuracy until the design phase is somewhat complete. Some companies will give you a low estimate for execution, and then raise the cost once you’re halfway through the project. That’s not our way. We prefer to avoid uncomfortable surprises.
• fancy presentations or proposals. If you ask us for a proposal we’ll send you an e-mail with the details of our plan. It won’t be gorgeous, but it will be simple, easy to read, and filled with the meat of the proposal. We prefer to put all our creative energy into your project, and not into fancy proposals. (We promise… your product will be way fancy and impressive though.)
• Hyper-detailed government style specifications for your software, (over)architecture diagrams, and enormous amounts of documentation. We’ve tried these before and every time we spend all this time on documenting what we’re going to do, what we actually do changes within minutes of us finishing the docs. The pictures and ultimately the code are the spec. We’re happy to give the meat and potatoes essential documentation. Beyond that we think is a waste of your money.
• us hanging around forever racking up bills. Unlike other consulting firms, we’re tiny. We don’t have a lot of mouths to feed and we aren’t looking to move in with you. We’re like a User Experience SWAT team. We drop in on zip lines, shoot the bad guys, and then are gone in our vans. We’re in, and we’re out. This way you know there’s an end to the consulting fees, and we’re motivated to help you move forward independently after we’re gone. Don’t get us wrong… we like repeat customers, we just try to avoid projects with no end date. We think you’d like to avoid those as well.

In a nutshell, that’s what we offer. We’re based in Seattle, but we can work with anyone anywhere. If you’d like to discuss a specific project or get a proposal, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Thanks. :)