Fresh Tilled Soil

In short

Fresh Tilled Soil has worked with product teams around Boston since 2006, on research, strategy, prototyping and design systems, and now operates as part of ADK. The service list is short: UX strategy, UX and UI design, product strategy and facilitated design sprints, with websites taken on alongside web and mobile apps. That steady focus on software products rather than marketing puts it at #2 on our Boston list.

For eClinical Solutions, whose elluminate platform manages clinical-trial data for more than 40 life sciences companies, it ran a nine-week engagement that opened with a five-day sprint and ended with a prototype tested by real data managers. For Cengage Learning's 4LTR Press it turned textbooks into a study web app, testing early builds with students at Bunker Hill Community College. Skydeo, a mobile audience-data company, had a working HTML prototype of a self-serve demo within three weeks.

Product teams in healthcare, education, finance and data-heavy B2B software that need to agree on the problem before building, and want an outside facilitator running sprints and user tests next to their own engineers, are the best match; Titleist, JSTOR and Broadridge are also on the client list. The published case studies are a few years old and the site footer still reads 2023, so ask for recent work. Packaging and print sit outside what it does.