Role
Interaction designer, liaison to UI team, stakeholder manager, dev team advocate
Project
One of my first big projects at Workiva was Content Mode Awareness. Users had trouble distinguishing between two content modes, editing and metadata management. The metadata mode was also difficult to discover.
First, I evaluated qualitative research data for themes. One major problem with the existing interface was that the UI for both modes looked almost identical. Data showed that users were effectively blind to the feature intended to distinguish the two. Also, the single entry point for the metadata mode was hidden on a little-used tab. I used these themes to guide my concept explorations.
A competitive review of mode awareness in Google Suite, Adobe XD, and other apps provided patterns to explore. I sketched 15-20 ideas for differentiating modes and another 10 for entry point discoverability, then narrowed them down based on technical constraints and collaborative feedback. To share out the project with my development team, I created a mid-fi click-through prototype in Balsamiq and presented research data to support my design choices.
One option for entry point discoverability involved changes to ecosystem patterns, the application’s building blocks of code and UI. I worked with the UI team and developers to estimate feasibility for this change, and determined that it was out of scope. Instead, I altered the design to produce a Minimum Valuable Product with less development effort that still met user needs. Further refinements are slated for second-pass development.
Both the discoverability and mode differentiation designs were approved, and are currently in development. Once the project is live, I’ll collect and analyze additional data via analytics and user testing to further validate my assumptions.