Rocket Whale Lead Gen Web App & Chrome Extensioni

Project Overview

The eponymous Rocket Whale was a product that allowed users to email anyone - no contact information required. Users were guided through a workflow to:

  • Find people in a target contact group.
  • Send an email to the person based on a template, without having to figure out their email address.
  • Repeat, over and over, very quickly.
  • Share all this activity amongst a team.

It was shut down because we didn't like the idea of being responsible for spam and our time was better spent on other projects.

Technology / Services

  • node.js
  • Ruby on Rails
  • PostgreSQL
  • Angular 1.x
  • Bootstrap
  • LESS CSS
  • Chrome Browser Extension
  • UI/UX Design & Branding
  • Product Management

“Your website got me an interview with the Wall Street Journal, VentureBeat, Engadget, and CNET.” - A Rocket Whale Customer

The Home Depot Product Management App

Rocket Whale has worked with Home Depot on multiple projects, the biggest being an internal product management app used by their large internal IT support team. The product is one-part internal marketing for all their software products, and one part idea/product management for what's to come next.

We've worked with staff from all departments, including senior technology directors, business analysts, designers, developers, project managers, and IT finance to create software that's valuable to all. The work has varied, from a Visio-like drag and drop diagramming editor to excel dashboard design & automation to basic communication tools.

Technology / Services

  • Product Management
  • UI/UX Design
  • Angular 1.x
  • Ruby on Rails
  • MongoDB
  • MariaDB
  • LESS CSS

We're going to let the fact that we've worked with multiple teams within Home Depot for several years speak for itself.

MacStadium Customer Dashboard/Portal

MacStadium's customer's portal was built in pieces over a long period of time and the user experience made them look more like "3 guys in a garage" rather than the professional hosting company they are. It also lacked several features their enterprise customers needed, namely role-based access control (RBAC).

After gaining a deep understanding of their information architecture, Rocket Whale designed a new customer portal from the ground up. We built a snazzy new front-end and directed the changes required to the existing back-end that would allow the two pieces to be joined together.

Want to experience the portal yourself? Sign up for a free trial account at macstadium.com.

Technology / Services

  • OOUX Info Architecture
  • Responsive Design
  • HTML5
  • Angular 2+
  • Bootstrap 4
  • Sass CSS3
  • Custom Illustration

Rocket Fuel Display Ad Campaigning & Reporting

Rocket Fuel uses the power of artificial intelligence to make digital advertising better. They partnered with Rocket Whale to design and build world-class data analytics software. We led the UI/UX design of new and existing features and our development team built new features and refactored others to get them ready for a production environment. Highlights included real-time dashboards, ad campaign creation wizards, role-based access control (RBAC), and more.

The Rocket Whale team more than doubled in size over the course of the contract in order to support Rocket Fuel as they went from ~100 employees to a $1b IPO in just over 2 years. The project concluded when we successfully transitioned all aspects to Rocket Fuel's growing internal team.

Technology / Services

  • Ext JS 4 & backbone.js
  • Ruby on Rails
  • node.js
  • MongoDB
  • MySQL
  • d3.js
  • Socket.IO
  • Cucumber/RSpec/Capybara
  • UI/UX Design & Branding
  • SASS/SCSS
  • Axure RP

"Rocket Whale completed several projects for Rocket Fuel (the name similarity is a coincidence) over the course of 2+ years, extremely well and on time. They provided beautiful and functional designs for a new version of our product, enabling us to offer our user interface to external customers for the first time. Their project management, quality of talent, and work in both engineering and design disciplines was top notch. They worked closely with our own product managers, designers and web developers, and served as a natural extension of our team, but they were also extremely effective when working independently on a standalone project. I would not hesitate to use them again for another web development consulting project in the future." - Mark Torrance, CTO at Rocket Fuel

Blissbook Digital HR Policy Managementi

Blissbook helps HR leaders protect their company and show employees they care at the same time. It is policy management software disguised as a culture-first, digital employee handbook that helps customers teach employees why they should care in addition to what they can or can't do.

We built Blissbook up from nothing to a growing, 6-figure revenues per year product, doing everything from customer discovery to design, branding, front- and back-end engineering, customer service, marketing, and everything in between.

Technology / Services

  • Product Management
  • UI/UX Design & Branding
  • Angular 1.x
  • React
  • node.js
  • MongoDB & MySQL
  • Cucumber/RSpec/Capybara
  • Bootstrap
  • LESS CSS
  • Custom Illustration

“We are so excited to share the handbook with our employees. This has been a wonderful journey. If we can be of any help sharing Blissbook, recommending, etc. please let us know. You guys are fabulous! Professional and responsive. It has been a pleasure.” - Blissbook Customer

HowTracker Templated Checklistsi

HowTracker is a checklist-based how-to platform centered on the idea that the ability to apply knowledge found is just as important as finding it. It's a place to share how to do things with others and a tool to help you actually do those things.

HowTracker was created from our need to create simple how-to guides that could actually be used as you get things done. It helps us consistently perform repeated tasks and processes in a trackable way. It's also handy for never forgetting what to pack for a ski trip!

Technology / Services

  • HTML5/CSS3
  • SASS/SCSS
  • jQuery
  • backbone
  • Ruby on Rails
  • MongoDB
  • Rackspace & Amazon S3
  • Design/Branding
  • Product Management

“Congratulations on the great product you built. Its simplicity is a 'must' for any app that wants to be used.”
"Wow, I just got wayyy too excited about HowTracker. But it's seriously amazing! It's the OCD project manager's dream."
"THIS SOFTWARE IS JUST AWESOME!"
- HowTracker Customers

NowSecure Dynamic Security Reports

NowSecure makes mobile app security easy for software teams and IT personnel. They came to Rocket Whale to design and build the most visible part of their new Intel product: the report customers use to understand their tests.

After clarifying the app's information architecture, we designed and built a beautiful, fast-loading, interactive, and dynamic report. Customers can export to PDF a customized version of the report to share with stakeholders, which put our design chops to the test as many of the test results include metadata like certificates, JSON, and data tables, all of varying shapes, lengths, and sizes, which all need to look great in a paginated PDF. In the HTML version, this metadata loads progressively as customers scroll so that the report itself loads quickly.

With our help, NowSecure launched their new product on-time with a dynamic reporting system that blows their competition away. The report was so well-received that Rocket Whale was hired again to re-implement it on another NowSecure product (Auto) and enhance it to allow customers to hide and/or annotate test results.

Technology / Services

  • Info Architecture
  • UI/UX Design (Sketch)
  • React
  • node.js
  • jsreport
  • webpack
  • redux
  • Sass CSS3
  • Bootstrap 4
  • postgres

"Rocket Whale was able to immediately dive into an extremely technical project quickly, and not only did they deliver in a timely fashion and at high quality they were excellent at gelling with the entire team. It was great to have additional capacity that was adept at both technical delivery and customer experience, a great one-two punch." - Alex Wishkoski, Head of Product

The Weather Channel & IBM Real-Time Location-Based Data Visualization

The Weather Channel (now IBM) is consistently collecting usage data from customers who are using weather.com, the weather channel app, and other products - to the tune of millions of data points per second. They hired Rocket Whale to figure out a way to visualize that data and compare it to other data sets (like storm or other weather data), to see if they could find any signals in the noise.

What Malcolm Gladwell does to scientific studies, we did to Weather's data. We designed multiple dashboards to tell the story of the data, making it usable and digestible to a larger audience. The biggest challenge we overcame was how to visualize such a large amount of data without rendering thousands of objects on the page, which would have slowed the dashboard down so much that it'd be unusable.

Technology / Services

  • UI Design
  • Angular 1.x
  • node.js
  • Bootstrap
  • Amazon S3
  • d3.js/C3.js
  • Leaflet
  • Karma
  • gulp/bower

We don't have a customer quote for this project but were later recommended to another group within IBM for another project.

get to know us