September 2020 - August 2021
Web Application
Senior Product Designer
BetterCloud is a company that specializes in providing a SaaS management platform. Their platform is designed to streamline various IT tasks by automating processes such as onboarding, offboarding, and mid-lifecycle changes.
My objective was to design an intuitive reporting interface that enables users to easily analyze their data, thereby empowering them to take action to simplify and automate all their SaaS software.
The current system at BetterCloud did not have a reporting feature which was a large pain points for users who could not get their data out of the product. As a Senior Product Designer, my goal was to deliver a reporting feature that would ultimately allow users to make informed actions to aid the overall health of their SaaS environment.
The primary users of this feature would be the customer IT administrators and security teams who use BetterCloud. These users will help automate their SaaS environment by building out reports to create alerts and workflows.
Role - Senior Product Designer, User Researcher, Interaction Designer, and Visual Designer.
Artifacts Created: Research findings document, personas, user flows, task flows, low and high-fidelity designs, and usability test findings document.
At AWS, we adopt a design delivery method that integrates crucial phases: Discovery, Concept, Detail, and Deploy—for all our projects.
Before I can begin designing, I need to better understand the user's perspective, leveraging two types of research methods, primary research (stakeholder interviews, internal interviews) & secondary research (competitive analysis).
Before I can start on my stakeholder interviews I always conduct my own "pre-research work". This work includes studying past interview and statistics created about reports previously that could assist with helping me shape the correct questions during user interviews.
Prior to joining the team, BetterCloud's UX department did not have a cohesive design process and team members were scouring the web for various templates that did not mesh well together. I was able to create and share my process, which uses both primary and secondary research techniques, with the design team which was adapted for all BetterCloud projects.
After presenting my research data to my stakeholders, I am ready to begin concept designs. My concept designs prioritize the main uses cases I discovered through my research.
I organized multiple working sessions with stakeholders who joined in on collaborating on ideas for the new reporting feature. During these white boarding sessions, I would identify the specific workflows I could tackle for the MVP, allowing my team and me to align on specific flows that I could expand on through designs.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these sessions were different than usual. I used a tool called MIRO that assisted in the collaboration of a large number of users at once.
During the whiteboarding sessions, I developed and refined key workflows based on the strategies we formulated. This process yielded significant insights, mainly the identification of optimal workflow designs that were not only feasible for our team to build but also capable of delivering an exceptional user experience.
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With requirements set and extensive research completed, I begin designing with the final deliverable being high fidelity wireframes that would be implemented by my development teams.
I tend to create my initial designs in my notebook because I find that I can quickly iterate using paper and pencil. This is important because you can quickly redesign the task flows without committing to a final design, reducing stress, time, and avoiding design debt.
Once my designs had not changed drastically I began to wireframe my designs with BetterCloud's design language. I build low-fidelity wireframes to review and approve with my team and then move towards high fidelity wireframes and see if BetterCloud's current components can support the new reporting feature or if there is a need to contribute a new component to achieve the best experience.
For this reporting feature, I contributed a card design (new feature) that would be used in addition to a list view (existing feature) to display the canned reports that a user has available in the BetterCloud application. Card design is now a feature available throughout the entire BetterCloud system.
Once my designs were reviewed and validated, my efforts quickly transitioned to creating concept tests to get customer feedback about my designs to iterate, if needed, before passing off my designs to be built by the development team.
My concept test consisted of a scenario and two tasks that users would walk through and provide feedback. I would evaluate my designs using UX measurements like time-on-task, ease of use, and user satisfaction. Because this was a new feature without previous benchmarks I used the averages from my internal usability tests to build out benchmarks that I would use when doing customer usability testing to give myself an understanding of how well the designs succeeded.
Task 1 - Finding email with forwarding report and running the report:
Task 2 - Can you update the "Report Level 1" role to grant full Google reporting privileges:
After completing the usability tests and confirming my designs for reporting I was ready to dispatch designs to the development team to begin work for the quarter. Due to the unforeseen departure of key development leaders, I had to make some tough design decisions to work with the available developers. Scoping down and pivoting our designs is not a rare occurrence in our field, so we have learned to do so while still providing value and integrity to our users.
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