What's the problem?
I was brought on board to design a new application, which was called Project Bento in its development stage. Both our internal Customer Success team and external agencies had been clamoring for a tool to make it easier to control delivery pipelines for data. We needed to build a portal for data analysts and media planners to collect, cleanse and prepare all the big data used in marketing and advertising analysis and research projects.
I took the lead on scoping, planning and documenting the information architecture for Bento, connecting context-dependent, disparate systems and comparing internal and external client pathways for a $90M business unit with 400+ clients.
I set up the design strategy and rationale, backing up my choices with research that focused on identifying core needs, mapping out user journeys, performing task analyses, and applying design thinking to product strategy.
Research! Hooray!
I conducted 14 task analysis interviews, created two new personas, and then combined all the qualitative feedback into a journey map to define the requirements of the application.
Design
I started designing early with pencil sketches, since it took a long time to get all the interviews finished and the scope defined.
A lot of potential users told me horrible stories about their problems monitoring progress of an engagement, so I built some data visualizations to allow different views of the engagement timeline (and point out who was holding things up).
Testing
I did all the design and prototyping in Axure RP, and an external agency did user testing of specific cases with an Invision duplicate.
Surprise! In our discovery phase, users asked for those project monitoring tools, but it turned out that they didn't really want to use them, so it was removed as a feature.
