App builder
Driving a product design vision through user research and cross-functional co-creation
Table of Contents
When I joined, stakeholders are misaligned …
… and there's a lot of disagreement regarding which direction the product should take to attack this market
To create alignment and define a product design vision towards the market opportunity …
… I engaged stakeholders in collaborative design activities towards an inclusive design approach …
… and ran a user research program to validate different concepts.
Our users are HR departments and the developers that support them, for example Armando who is an HR admin at Netflix
In this role, Armando needs to leverage Workday technologies to serve Netflix employees. For example, he might have to capture employees' vacinnation statuses in their return to office program …
… he often needs to customize inbuilt Workday functionality to serve his use cases …
… and collaborates across an internal team of technical and non-technical users to deliver those enablements
Once Upon a Time on a Product Team
In this story, I'll be collaborating closely with PM and Engineering
Along with other cross-functional stakeholders across Workday
The story starts when Product Management has identified a new market opportunity
After collaborative problem definition and co-creating potential solutions, we landed on three high level ideas
The first idea allowed users to build their workflows like lego blocks. Here the user would create a backend object to connect to a form field
The second idea worked like a development environment, where users could write code and preview its results within a single window
The third idea provided users a visual interface to create a prototype of the desired end result first
I collaborated with internal teams — such as Customer Success and Sales — to source users and ran the outreach to setup a research program quickly
The user base for the study spanned across technical and non-technical users, and was representative of the end users for the product
I conducted a scenario-based usability study and counter-balanced the sequencing of prototypes to insure the highest fidelity data. Users rated each of the different approaches on a five-point scale after going through the workflow
To create solutions inclusively, I engaged stakeholders in the problem definition stage
In a workshop, shown here, we looked at competitor workflows for handling these use cases and dot voted to define areas of opportunity
In a subsequent workshop, I guided the team in co-creation activities that I learned in courses at Ideo
As we started to gain alignment around solutions, I built higher fidelity workflows on a whiteboard to elucidate the ideas in more detail
While the amount of data wasn't statistically significant, the initial data suggested a strong preference for the third idea
The first idea, once again, was to build workflows by creating elements using forms then linking them together with code
Users found it somewhat effective
The second approach presented a development environment for users to create an preview their custom workflows
While users found this approach slightly more effective, they still had reservations
The third approach enabled users to start with the ending and create the desired output using visual components
This approach resonated with both technical and non-technical users by allowing them to work together to create quick prototypes to share across the team
By understanding the user's context of use within a team of technical and non-technical users — informed by the user research study — we were able to align around a product design vision
The Work
Solutions to identified pain points
Define
Design
Discover
Deliver

Specifically, I compiled …

  • Internal Research
  • Competitive Research View Examples
  • Market Research

I then…

Specifically, I …

  • Collaborated with the Research Team
  • Conducted 1:1 Usability Testing
  • Synthesized the Findings for Stakeholders

When finalizing the project I …

  • Collaborated with Developers to Implement Interactions
  • Documented Guidelines for Other Teams
  • Monitored Performance Metrics on Release
I leverage a four step iterative process. Define, Design, Discover, Deliver
When defining, I look to define the problem from the user, the market, and the business perspectives.
Depending on the stage of the project, I'll then make some designs. If its early, I'll be working on high level designs; if later, I'll create something higher fidelity.
I'll then test the solution with some users and synthesize the findings.
When delivering, I'll work cross-functionally to unblock edge cases, ensure success metrics are captured, and collaborate to implement delightful interaction.
The Process
The process I follow, and how I used it to deliver this project
Within a complext environment with many competing ideas, I drove alignment towards a design vision …
… through an inclusive design approach and collaborative co-creation …
… and leveraging user research as a key component in the alignment process
I setup a sprint structure to provide stakeholders timelines on design delivery …
… and collaborated on a roadmap to meet near term needs that set the stage for the long-term product vision
… that serves the user by enabling their team to collaborate across disciplines on their works in progress
The Results
What came out of the work
Thank you!
I appreciate you taking the time to review my work