workiva user experience case study

Product Design Frame-work

Before you begin to engage in deliberate discovery work with any opportunity, it’s best to size it up with other opportunities you have. This framework provides the tools necessary to operate in a lean manner.

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Overview

This project aims to deliver a framework that empowered product teams to understand how to frame product improvement ideas in terms of its value to your organization and its target audience.

There will always be more possible products, features, or feature improvements to build than there is time to make them. Think of these ideas as potential opportunities.

Before teams began to engage in deliberate discovery work on any opportunity, it’s best to size it up with other opportunities they have had. Without these constraints, a design process can expand out of control very quickly.

01.

Workiva’s R&D size had grown to over 400 resources. These talented men and women were engineers, delivery managers, product managers, and user experience professionals. Alongside R&D executives, we all were responsible for delivering best-of-enterprise offerings.

02.

Product managers and UXers work together daily. In addition to overseeing a healthy and collaborative culture, we needed to identify and build the right offerings, at the right time, for the right product. Understanding the benefit to the user was a critical factor in determining product direction.

03.

Members of R&D varied in their career length. We had a diverse staff made up of interns who had converted to FTE’s and tenured engineering staff that had been involved at Workiva since the beginning. I recognized a gap in the training they had received and saw the opportunity to level up the organization.

Project Constraints

I recognized that to achieve success with this product, it needed to be accessible to all audiences. If I delivered something technologically complicated, the barrier to entry would be too large for broader adoption. If I made it too minimal, it would go overlooked and ignored.
Great design is timeless. Like product design – in organizational design, the importance of longevity is vital. The delivery mechanism that I would choose would be critical for not only the maintenance of this new solution but also in retaining its relevance.
It needed to be diverse in its content delivery. I was dealing with an R&D organization that had a myriad of personality types. We had a mixture of early career product managers, experienced engineers, and a world-class UX organization made up of designers, researchers and content writers.

where did i fit in?

Roles & Responsibilities

01.

I served as the primary author of this framework in early drafts. I later engaged and delegated subsequent versions to active UX managers.

02.

As a department leader, I felt the ownership of responsibility to level up our product organization in techniques and best practices.

03.

I was also responsible for identifying champions in other departments in R&D, who I could actively collaborate with and count on to help evangelize best practices.

Identifying The

User Personas

My primary use cases centered around the R&D organization at Workiva. We created world-class enterprise offerings that increased transparency or financial reporting in the world’s economies.

My task was to deliver and serve a varied population of technology professionals who had different levels of product discovery knowledge. We had principal level professionals with a decade-plus of experience, coupled with earlier career teammates who had an innate hunger to level up in their skillset.

Product Discovery

Process

Competitive Analysis

Jeff Patton is one of my favorite product leaders. Not only is he humble, but his patience is second to none. I have bestowed upon him the title of “If I had to choose to work with one person for the rest of my career, it would be Jeff Patton.” Not sure if he appreciates that, but it’s fitting, and if you have met him, I am sure you would agree.

Jeff’s training and books on story mapping are critical for any organization. In January of 2019, I had him return to Workiva for a week-long session of product discovery and training sessions. With the influx of new UXers and Product Managers, there was a real need to level up our product organization as we neared the end of our parity efforts getting off the flash platform.

Core competencies in Patton’s book formed the bookends that would eventually become the outline for my presentation framework.

Design Concepts

For the first iteration, I chose to create this effort on our own Workiva Platform as a presentation template. This was selected for two reasons:

Dogfooding your product is always best.
Leveraging a template would allow me to maintain version control with subsequent releases.

I based the template on the following outline:

OPPORTUNITY Is the problem worth solving?
DISCOVERY Is the solution worth building?
CONCEPT & DESIGN Have we explored our options?
UX & TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE REVIEW Is this the solution we want to build?
POST LAUNCH Is the solution solving the problem?
Project impact guide and communication planning, along with references

What was contained in each section totaled roughly 35 slides in total. People solving significant product challenges are invited to start with their “opportunity statement” As their discovery progresses, they are authoring a valuable artifact that can be used for both reference and stakeholder management.

User Testing

As with my onboarding program, this represented an opportunity to develop an internal CDP program for beta users. My first step was to present the framework at PM and UX weekly team meetings. I led a workshop that allowed each group to fill out the structure in a time-boxed environment, discussing as a group while progressing.

Once the framework was introduced, I solicited a handful of beta-testers to join a newly created slack room where I could receive feedback to improve the process. We gained the additional benefit of rapid peer feedback during the discovery cycle.

In Closing

Outcomes & Lessons

01.

By unifying our discovery techniques, we were able to increase collaboration and comradery amongst teams that typically did not work together. Another benefit was that we were able to adopt the very best processes for useful discovery and share with the larger organization.

02.

Releases cycles increased; Not in the speed of taking a 2-week sprint down to 1 week, but in the sense that a proper blueprint affected the entire product team. Engineers were looped in earlier for feasibility. Product managers earned increased trust from stakeholders that the features being built delivered value. And designers could rest assured that given the validation loop they embraced, that concepts were validated.

03.

One other takeaway that I did not anticipate was the burden of “completing the slide deck.” The first response was to educate the users that while the entire deck contained an end to end solution, it was not a one-size-fits-all solution. Slides could be duplicated or removed based on the needs of the product team, and lean principles should be followed.

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What I’m Currently Reading…

Atomic Design

by Brad Frost

We're tasked with making interfaces for more users in more contexts using more browsers on more devices with more screen sizes and more capabilities than ever before. That's a daunting task indeed. Thankfully, design systems are here to help. Learn more

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