About us, and our recent work

WHAT WE DO — smackerel specializes in digital product design, creative direction, and project management.

DAVE GROFF AND KEVIN STEELE have been designing digital products for more than 20 years. We founded Canada's first interactive agency, Mackerel, and acted as co-creative directors from 1989 to 1997. We were energized then by the mission of giving form to a new medium. In 2003 smackerel was founded to reconnect with that mission and the energy that comes with it. You can see some of our older work here.

WHAT WE’VE DONE RECENTLY —

ROSETTA STONE — For the past three years, Kevin and a small smackerel team have been providing product design consulting for Rosetta Stone, the legendary language learning software company. We were part of the team developing Version 3 of Rosetta Stone, as well as their latest product, TOTALe, which was released this summer.
Tech Crunch wrote an excellent review of the product here. Of course, the article scarcely mentions the interface; after all, you’re not supposed to notice that sort of thing. But when they did notice, it was to say that ‘the interface is quite simple’ and visually ‘top notch’. Then they got quickly back to raving about the product’s amazing features, which we think is the whole point. A longer story about our Rosetta Stone work is in progress.

     

CANWEST NEWSPAPER REDESIGN — Dave spent the past four years as the director of user experience for Canwest Digital. He recently left Canwest to rejoin smackerel full time.
As Canwest's primary UX architect, Dave led the 2008 re-design of their newspaper websites, resulting in a significant boost in audience and revenue. The newspaper websites were underperforming at the time, with significant usability issues impairing audience growth. A user-centric approach was indicated.
Of course, a user-centric approach would require significant cultural change within the organization. The first step was accepting that business goals must be balanced against user goals. The second step was perhaps more challenging: giving the design team permission to ‘make mistakes’ as they searched for the right solution. Our approach called for three rounds of rapid protyping, followed by independent user-testing, uncovering many design issues which were addressed in the next prototype.

After six months of design and development, the newspaper sites re-launched in November 2008. The results were immediate: the redesigned sites quickly acheieved a 50% increase in traffic, and a 70% increase in revenue.

     

CONTACT SMACKEREL
We'd love to talk about your next interactive project!
email Dave: dave@smackerel.net
phone Dave: 647-202-2316
Dave on Linkedin
email Kevin: kevin@smackerel.net
phone Kevin: 416-532-0039
Kevin on Linkedin