Innovate & Design A New Product
Project Scope
Conceptual product design for an innovative supply chain management solution providing actionable insights into a company's SLA's and IT services.
My Role Phase 1
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Lead internal Product Designer managing the relationship of, and partnering with, a 3rd party design firm on both design and research.
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Provided the foundational direction for the product, identifying what the user experience would be from the ground up. (Joint effort with 3rd party firm)
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Helped Product Management define features and foundational concepts.
My Role Phase 2
Lead Product Designer, UX, User Research
The ID of this dashboard was a combined effort between a 3rd party design firm and me. Visual design was from 3rd party design firm alone.
Business Needs
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Create a tool offering a single view of all IT services with drill downs to role relevant information, that clarifies the impact of SLA & IT Service business decisions in the immediate and longer term perspectives.
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Need to unify data in a fractious environment made up of legacy systems. Target users doubt a single tool can address the issue.
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Provide a core link between planning and operations.
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Show impacts in estimated costs, delivery and ROI for different solutions compared to each other.
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Integration of product with the wide range of tools already in use and home grown within organizations.
User Experience Challenges We Faced
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The IT supply chain management was a nascent concept in the industry and users and organizations would need guidance and inspire confidence and participation.
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Cross-product integration from a user experience perspective.
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Demonstrate achievability of the product promise in a user’s complex environment.
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Guide users to supply chain management while still providing immediate value in management of the current state.
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Over-burdening End Users – with catalogs of over a thousand services, target users were concerned about the effort to collect meaningful amounts of indicative data.
Design Goals
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Provide a holistic view of the IT Supply Chain.
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Provide collaboration tools for evaluating alternate candidates.
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“Zero to Productive in 30 minutes”.
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Platform for guiding actionable improvement.
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Keep a business user focus (summary data, drilldown, and alerts) for the UI.
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Guide systematic improvement of service delivery.
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Create Interaction Pattern Library.
Discover, Research & Define
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User Input: Interviewed managers from procurement, application delivery and enterprise architecture groups as representative users. 19 customer interviews via on-site visits and remote calls.
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Stakeholder Input: Interviewed 8 Product, Sales/Marketing and Development managers from Cloud and Service Management for stakeholder information.
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Competitive Analysis: Because there were no similar products on the market we looked at products that addressed one of the following: financial orientation, discovering infrastructure components & service monitoring. As well as best practices and relevant interaction patterns for self improvement from other industries. This work was primarily led by the 3rd party design firm
We focused on three types of users:
Senior decision-makers,
Enterprise Architects,
Operational users
Defining our strategy
From our findings we worked together to identify key tasks, an information architecture and . From there we built out and presented our strategy and roadmap to key stakeholders
Design & Validation
Ideation & Prototyping
After several joint ideation sessions we developed wireframes, technical notes and high fidelity prototypes that covered priority task flows and all user messaging. We continued to flesh out additional tasks/wireframes in future phases of the project.
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Visual Design
The 3rd party design firm created a visual identity for this project that was based off of the corporate style guide, only more modern and with the addition of new feature styles. This was then shared with the marketing/branding team for incorporation into the companies enterprise wide style guide.
Validation
Throughout the product's life cycle various tasks were tested with our target audience for validation and design were iterative based on testing results.
Guided Entry new concept and to help users become productive right away.
Solving a design challenge
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Provide collaboration tools for evaluating alternate candidates.
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Collect meaningful amounts of indicative data.
"I would like you to see the email below and pass on my personal commendation for Lisa. She truly has been one of the major forces holding this project together so far, the more so because of all the organizational and strategy changes that have occurred over the last 9 months.
I know she is recognized by (...) and the (...) Engineering team as extremely pivotal to the project success, and I have personally enjoyed her advice and counsel as well as admiring the work I see her do with the team."
- SVP