Internal products can be beautiful too

By Maria Cerase, Lead product manager, MiQ

Human error accounts for 70 – 80 percent of mishaps in any given field, from cybersecurity to manufacturing. This is a staggering statistic, especially when we think about sensitive fields like medicine, transportation and security.

What statistics don’t tell you, is that many of those mishaps involve a form of human-machine interaction with internal applications. This raises the question: can we eradicate human error through better interaction design? Here at MiQ, we think the answer is ‘yes’.

Good interaction design, and good design in general, is intentional. The quality of internal software is fundamental to the success of any business, but internal software development is often given less love and attention than its external counterpart. This can set off a spiral of bad quality software that impacts employees performance, which in turn impacts customer satisfaction.

Here at MiQ we have made our technology layer a key aspect of our strategy, incorporating our key values of unity and agility through our technology and its design. We want to provide exceptional service, paired with powerful and thoughtfully designed internal applications, that truly augment the skills, knowledge and creativity of our employees.

This is why we have created the Fiber Design System. Fiber is MiQ’s proprietary design system that merges beauty and functionality, to give our analysts, traders, and salespeople, more confidence and joy when using internal applications.

FiberIt is built to be performant, simple and modular. This is a considerable challenge, as we operate in a very complex space, where users need to make sense of vast amounts of data, quickly and efficiently. Since its establishment in late 2019, Fiber has been placed at the heart of our design and development work, meaning we can collaborate and create exciting products and features more quickly.

In the past year alone, Fiber has seen a tremendous growth in terms of component count and complexity, and now includes more than 20 components, with several variants. All these building blocks have been carefully designed and researched, to fit the needs of our programmatic media clients. And results are already showing: new designs are being implemented up to 50% more quickly, and internal user satisfaction is rising.

MiQ is delivering on the promise of better connected marketing, and key to this is thoughtful and beautiful design. The mission is simple: to make every single touch point with our users, a delightful experience.

Find more about our designs on Dribbble.

Learn more about our technology at MiQ and how it powers killer campaigns for our clients: