This enterprise software leader has been dominating the industry for over 2 decades. A very complex web based solution started showing its age - user interface and user experience started falling behind industry standards. My team and I were tasked with updating and improving user experience of the product.
What seemed like a pretty straight forward task has turned out to be a very transformative experience both, in what the product looked like as well as how we worked together as a team to deliver value to our users.
TRANSFORMATIONS:
The way we deliver value to clients - consistent and clean user interface that drives value to the user and showcases user experience best practices
The way we work together - empowered engineering and product management teams
Big Project, Small Chunks
This was a big task with many stakeholders and many moving parts, here are some of my key responsibilities:
- Meet with stakeholders to identify short-term goals and easy wins.
- Develop design roadmap that outlines our new product vision and team’s actionable items.
- Design a comprehensive UI pattern library that can be leveraged by the entire product management team to deliver consistent experiences.
- Create flexible design system that includes our core design principles, aesthetics of the product (colour, typography, iconography) as well as error messaging guide.
- Establish ongoing cadence of design reviews and progress updates with the engineering team to keep the project on track.
Empowering The Teams
We’ve developed a scalable design system that can be leveraged by the entire team to build meaningful experiences for our clients which can be quickly implemented by our engineers.
Working in a collaborative cross-functional environment I identified specific layouts and UI patterns that improve usability of our product. Outlining specific use cases and establishing usage guidelines I was able to empower product managers to implement their own experience which followed our visual style and user experience best practices.
Transforming How We Work
Big part of this project was to demonstrate to the organization that cross-functional teams can work very efficiently together. We've included engineering early on in the process, making them a stakeholder in the entire project, which is something that was never done before in the organization.
Giving the power to the teams to self organize and set their own KPIs ensured a successful deployment of the product. We were able to create a scalable design system that can be leveraged by cross-functional teams to deliver meaningful experiences to our clients.
