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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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
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.
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
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.