Next Gen Content Library CRUD Redesign

Historically, only Product, Engineering, and Services organizations are involved in determining which projects make it onto the product roadmap. Designers are often engaged only when it comes time to act upon a project. As lead UX designer, I felt it was very important to build trust between cross-functional teams and to advocate for my organization.

This project was the first of a series modeled after GV’s Design Sprint completed over 6+ months as part of a collaborative effort to implement a more rigorous user-centered design and testing process for the Websites team at CDK. I was responsible for arranging and facilitating the sprint. My tasks include distilling and articulating the problem, and keeping discussion on track, along with prototyping, testing and supporting the long tail. I was also the subject matter expert for Next Gen. Core participants were myself, two designers, a researcher, the product owner, and the lead developer.

Process Improvements, Design Sprint, Rapid Prototyping, User Testing

Challenge

It had been almost 2 years since the launch of the Next Gen websites platform. Over that time, my team and I have collected both internal and external users feedbacks, many of which centered around the CRUD experience in the Content Library. For this project, we chose to concentrate on the following issues:

Content Library landing page/experience is unfriendly and overwhelming for light and moderate users.
Content types are confusing. The meaning and purpose is unclear.
Common tasks are complicated and/or take a lot of steps, slowing down super users.
Content library structure and system is not intuitive/discoverable: content reuse model does not match some user groups' expectation and process.
There is no obvious way to create a new record.
List of content types on left panel of View All Records is overwhelming and forces users to filter to a content type before they need to.

Process

I spent some time prior to the start of the project catching other designers and a researcher on the ins and outs of the Next Gen Platform. Once this is done, we spent a week exploring the problem and sketching solutions. The next week was spent prototyping and testing with users, followed by another week of writing functional specifications

Ideation & Sketching

Overall, the team went through 3 rounds of ideation and refinements. By the end of the 3rd round, there were two likely solutions. Since we did not want to test both, the researcher and I then went through an exercise to vet every design decision against a pain-point. After which we were able to iterate to create a single solution to be tested.

Vetting design decisions againts user paint points.

Rapid Prototyping & Testing

Due to time constraints and participants access, we chose to test using paper prototypes with internal users.

Using paper prototypes got us better feedback by eliminating technical distractions. It is easy and cheap and allows us to run multiple quick tests before going into development.

Outcome

By the end of this project, we successfully demonstrated to the business the benefit of a (somewhat) more rigorous design process and paved the way for more collaboration between all groups. After this project, it was noted by my immediate management that developers are more open to feedback and would initiate contract with the design group for input and that internal user groups no longer hesitate to volunteer their time when needed. Although these projects did not address all the underlying issues, it did go a long way to building trust and better rapport between all groups involved, paving the way for future improvements.

As for the redesign itself, it was successfully implemented and well received by users in 2017. Anecdotally it has significantly shortened the time it takes to create and edit records, with one user notably saying "I can park here and do my work!"