How CrowdVision used Anima to deliver in record time2 min read

Name: Stephen Callender | Job title: VP Product @ CrowdVision

You’d imagine a company that deals with social distancing would be super busy during COVID. You would be right.

Stephen is the VP product and designer of CrowdVision, a company providing analytics and insights on crowds and busy spaces. An already booming industry and now with a pandemic is a real necessity for products like these and they are needed now.

This is why working on many different projects, with fast-paced, and advanced requirements mean that Stephen has to provide quality results, and fast, and this is why he and his team turned to Anima.

“We were in a position where we had to build really quickly, for different screen sizes and remotely – Anima was an essential tool for us”.

CrowdVision dashboard showing insights for crowded spaces - using Anima

When he got a project with a huge corporate, his company was expected to deliver a crowd analytics product for concert venues, in a short space of time. This meant a whole new UI (user interface) for Stephen, the pressure was very real.

“I could design something in Austin and push out all these different code packages to my engineer counterpart in California and it actually worked. Without Anima, it would have been a ton of front-end development”.

Getting code from Adobe XD with Anima

On a different project, Stephen created an interactive prototype that implements videos. Working mostly on Adobe XD, he was now at a loss of how to embed videos in his prototypes.

Naturally, he turned to Anima to create a responsive, interactive prototype (in Adobe XD) and embedded the videos.

“For one project I had to put a text bar showing how to type a search term, XD doesn’t allow that, so I used Anima with Adobe XD. I found Anima to be a much more feature-rich prototyping tool”.

Rounding up our conversation Stephen discussed the biggest benefit Anima brought to his team, jokingly pointing out:

“Nobody likes to do front-end work, everybody hates it, it’s like what every full-stack developer feels. It’s grunt work and not what they are excited to do”.

The engineers of CrowdVision need to collect and work with a lot of data and analytics that later need to be presented in user-friendly dashboards. By designing the front-end in Anima and then using the code produced by Anima, Stephen saved valuable time. This allowed his team to work on the core of the product, the algorithms, and its backend.

One of Stephen's dashboards design with Adobe XD and Anima 

The ability to complement his skills with Amina (through Adobe XD), the quality working code, fast productivity and delivery, and the hours of work hours saved is exactly why Anima is a big hit with his team.