CASE STUDY 04: U.S. GOVERNMENT CLIENT
Transforming an Unreliable Data Visualization Tool into an Essential Asset
Dashboard organizing all assessments by office.
Launched
01 January 2024
Role
UI/UX Designer
Team
2x UI/UX Designers
1x Product Manager
8x Developers
Project context
Redesigning an existing tool (with a lot of emotional baggage) to track progress of initiatives at the Agency and present that progress to Agency leadership. Spoiler: lots of lessons learned in this project!
Confidential project (NDA)
This project is under an NDA. I can’t share all the details online but I can discuss my role on the project in greater detail on a call.
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DESIGN DECISION 01
If you can’t change the naming system, change the information architecture
A recurring issue I observed with users is that a majority of users were not certain about which data type they had to categorize their inputted info under. The proximity of data types made it harder for users to decide. So my colleague and I decided to separate the spaces in which each are inputted in an effort to untangle the two data types and support users figuring out how to input and create new data.
01
Enabled clear separation of data types to distinguish one from the other
02
Form changes asynchronously to correspond to the data type selection prior
01
02
We redesigned the Create form to asynchronously adjust to the type of supporting item selected by the user.
PROJECT PIVOT 01
Our client lead changed; and with that came new priorities.
Our new point of contact (POC) had differing business priorities and ideas for strategy for this project. To manage this change, I focused on developing rapport with the new POC and adapting our strategy as well.
My team and I had to make the decision to scrap the previous design direction because we needed to keep our client happy at all cost.
The new POC felt strongly about designing around the briefing experience.
PROJECT KICKOFF
How might we improve the discoverability of a less-than-liked legacy system?
After our success with its sister application, the client team approached us asking for a tune-up of its shunned sibling app. We launched our signature 5-day design sprint both gathering data from users and tracking client reporting.
We learned that the tool as it was was unusable primarily because of discoverability issues, so our goal became to improve discoverability, grow the task completion rate and make users happier.
01
Work around inherently confusing data structures
Better display ILAB’s humanitarian projects for greater visibility, discoverability and retention
02
Make it easy for users to get their tasks done for leadership to review
Make it easy for users to input data so that they can be assessed by leadership.
03
Constraint: we can’t change data structures or their naming systems
My first instinct to improve the experience, but the client made clear it was a no-go.
01
New priority, smaller user group
We were asked to create a new Executive briefing view for one team, not the entire userbase.
02
Crunch time prototyping
Without changing the original deadline for the project, we designed then developed a solution.
03
Demonstrated success
Improved leadership briefings resulted in the team receiving greater budgets for their work.
PROJECT PIVOT 03
The project was sunsetted. I made sure our team was covered.
Because the client side suffered from leadership vision changes, and those changes involved creating robust bespoke applications, we had to extend our deadline. The client team’s leadership (who dispenses their budget) was not pleased with that, and so the team lost all funding for the project.
This didn’t feel like a major surprise given that the client POC kept changing and visions were so drastically different. It was a bit of a relief for all, given how taxing these changes had become on our developers.
What next?
I worked with my team to make sure everyone had something else lined up. I was able to pull two of our developers onto another contract I was working on. Everyone was able to find work thankfully!
What I learned
It’s challenging when a project you are dedicated to gets pulled out from under you, but this experience gave me lessons learned that I wouldn’t have been able to discover otherwise.
I could have more strongly advocated for more thorough design and discovery processes
Managing relationships in times of disruption and change is crucial
Sometimes projects are going to fizzle out; best to catch that early and prepare those involved however possible
PROJECT PIVOT 02
Another leadership disruption and a new vision for the tool.
More shakeup on the client team meant a new client POC with competing priorities. This time, the POC asked us to pivot to an entirely different user group. This was admittedly discouraging because we had become experts at understanding the last group, but it was a good opportunity to challenge ourselves to meet the ask with determination and verve.
We lined up user interviews and had very close contact with a select few users who provided key input onto how the new dashboard view needed to be set up.
This time, the focus was on a user group relying heavily on metrics.
01
New priority, new user group
We found the new user group to have polar opposite needs from this tool.
02
Iteration was circuitous
We were gathering research piecemeal rather than in one standalone phase - a risky process.
03
Deadline extended
The change in vision and request for bespoke versions of the tool forced us to have to push back our release.
Executive briefing view, in presentation mode, that we created to satisfy the interim client lead’s strategy for the project.
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Case Study 03