PRODUCT BACKGROUND
DaVinci is a platform where associates can create inspirational scenes from Home Depot’s products, publish those scenes onto The Home Depot website, and then advertise those products on Pinterest.
DaVinci was originally built by software engineers with no UX or PM input.
EVALUATING THE TOOL
For six months, I was placed on the product team along with another UX Designer. During this time, I co-led the research, designs, and facilitation. My first step was to conduct a heuristic evaluation of the tool.
the tool before UX.
Using Nielsen’s 10 User Interface Design Heuristics, I conducted a heuristic review of the product as is.
The highest theme was heuristic 5: error prevention.
The interface does a good job of notifying the user of the status of changes and where they are in the process.
I presented this deck to my management team (fellow UX designers) who gave me feedback.
Since my product team solely consists of my IT manager and software engineers, I catered the deck and recommendations to terms that they would understand.
After applying the feedback of the deck and presentation itself to my managerial team, I presented to my product team, including next steps we should take as a team
After the presentation, I interviewed the total users for an initial discovery of their usage with the tool. The goal of the user interviews were:
to better understand how users use the tool
to understand how users’ goals can be achieved and pains can be alleviated through the product
to get a broader understanding of the value of DaVinci to users and how UX might create opportunities
Through the discovery interviews, I was able to identify the primary users.
It was interesting to find out that the social media specialists were the primary users, instead of the stylists, whom the engineers had previously deemed to be the primary user group. This discovery presented itself as the first challenge I faced with my product team: the team had been focusing on developing features for the wrong users, and they still believed we should focus on the stylists even though they are not using the tool nearly as often as the social media specialists.
After the user interviews, I asked my engineers and IT manager to participate in synthesizing the interviews.
This was the first time that they had heard about the opinions of the users they designed for, and many of them were surprised at the insights. My IT manager even blurted out, “I didn’t realize it took the social media specialists this long to complete one step of their workflow! I didn’t know there were so many workarounds.” This was the a-ha moment for her, and she was able to gain empathy from this exercise and begin to understand the value of research and iteration.
the themes that were created from synthesizing transcripts of user interviews with core team
I facilitated the synth and created the above themes with my core team. When my IT manager and developers saw that duplicates and hotspot issues were the top themes, they began to understand that most of the problems were faced by the social media specialists; however, they still had the mindset that they were not the primary user, so the issues were not worth fixing.
After identifying the themes, I created problem statements and ranked them. Then, I asked my team and social media specialists to rank the statements as well.
I then called another alignment meeting and collaborated with my IT manager and lead engineer to prioritize the problems further, so we could agree on which problems to tackle first.
Since my product team didn’t have a product manager, stories (both user and technical/system-facing) are decided and created by the IT manager and sometimes, the lead developer.
In the past, the team’s stories were written in the perspective of the system and not the user. I helped to introduce the Gherkin formula and showed the team the value of creating user centered stories on PivotalTracker.
We also did our first design studio - I introduced it to my team by having each member come up with an idea for our team logo. I felt that thinking about what our logo could be would help us have a sense of unity and a chance to develop our brand.
Once we had a few user stories in the icebox of PivotalTracker, I created a team board on our whiteboard wall - unique from our PivotalTracker in that it would not only be a way for UX and engineers to align but to provide visibility, both of UX to other UX teams and to the surrounding product teams who are curious about our tool.
CHALLENGES
My first challenge of receiving push-back was when I wanted to implement a feature based on user feedback of a concept test, but engineers gave push back because it would be against the feature that the business had asked for. We were able to align on implementing the feature when I talked with my developers and explained the pros that would result from it (reduced time, ease of access). The developers told me we would go through with it as long as I convince the product owners first, so I did.
SUCCESSES
Users expressed increased satisfaction from using the tool and a much faster, smoother workflow. They also loved that their opinions were heard and implemented quickly.
I wrote research posts on the company’s UX website and made sure to send it out via email and slack to everyone on the team, including the IT director and product owners. 4 of my research posts were in the top 50 viewed posts from Jan 2018-Jan 2019.
We also added users to our channel on slack so that they can express any concerns before our biweekly (avg) sessions and tied Google Analytics to measure their usage.
the tool after UX.
Some features that were added to the main dashboard:
Thumbnail images added for ease of scanning
icons changed to represent the different pages.
Search bar adjusted to resemble standard design system patterns
Pagination improved
Header and collection count column added