Cross Product Experiences
Below are descriptions of some of the design work I have led and contributed to as a member of the design system team at Workday from 2019 - 2021. For brevity, I have not gone into immense details but I provide a high level overview and lessons from my experiences that have informed my growth and process as a Product Designer.
Content Aggregation Framework
The goal of this work was to design and implement a new content aggregation framework across the system. This framework enhanced the wayfinding experience by increasing navigational and contextual affordances and providing new content delivery methods.
I served as lead Product Designer for continued design efforts on this framework. My contributions consisted of conducting research, designing framework updates (visual, interaction, navigational), and working closelywith teams up-taking the framwork. I aided teams in crafting curated experiences for their users through consultation and usage guideline documentation.
Card Pattern
The goal of this project was to enhance and enable the uptake of a card framework to provide familiar and effective ways of presenting easily digestible information.
I led the growth of this pattern by exploring new card types and experiences enhancements based on user needs. I created documentation to align cross-functional partners on the purpose of each card and how/when to use them. I also served as a consultant to aid teams in using ?Cards and to ensure cohesion across the entire product.
Task Completion Pop-up
The goal of this project was to transform the full page task completion experience into a succinct pop-up notification. The simplified pop-up increased efficiency by creating a clear sense of completion and context and increased navigational flexibility.
As lead Product Designer, I worked closely with teams to understand their individual use cases, partnered with researchers to gather and aggregate insights across the product, and worked highly iteratively and collaboratively with PM’s and our development team.
Who were the stakeholders for this work?
The nature of cross-product work is that everyone (and I mean, everyone!) is a stakeholder. All these features and frameworks are implemented systemwide, across different product areas, user types and teams. Therefore, I collaborate and consult closely with individuals across numerous teams and roles (Design, Research, Leadership, Product Management, Engineering, and QA....to name a few.) This is where communication and documentation become highly important.
What lessons did I learn?
You can’t predict every scenario or edge case. But you can take steps to mitigate the risks.
Even with a highly collaborative process, to design a pattern that will be used throughout the entire product across numerous use cases and users is inherently challenging. To rectify this I learned to mitigate the risk through proactivity - talking with your stakeholders, gathering feedback frequently, documenting decisions and guidelines, and most importantly: transforming designs into code with real data as early as possible. I focus on the large percentage of the experience I can identify and control, and leave room in my process to learn from and address the remaining percentage that emerge.
Collaborate and delegate
Designing platform-wide patterns means that I often do not have a particular user type or workflow I focus on. This can bring challenges when exploring designs in context, and conducting research to gather insights. Who do you recruit? What workflows and scenarios do you prototype? These challenges necessitate closely collaborating across teams. Throughout my process, I’ll often conduct interviews with PM’s, Designers and Researchers to understand their product areas and workflows as well as collect their feedback at each stage of the process from early concepts to higher fidelity designs.
Through this process, I’ve learned a valuable lesson balancing collaboration and delegation. Not only am I able to rely on product area experts for their knowledge and ability to properly incorporate the designs and collect valuable insights, but this process also creates shared ownership and encourages cross-product thinking beyond any silos.
Lead with Intent and Purpose
How can we ensure that patterns are used properly? Throughout my time on the XPX team, I’ve learned a great deal about the importance of clear, understandable documentation and usage guidelines. The goal of good documentation is to reduce ambiguity or assumptions, to ensure that anyone who utilizes a pattern is aligned on it’s purpose and how to use it.
Grounding guidelines in intent and principles means that anyone who plans to implement cards into their designs are aligned on a shared understanding, and can make informed decisions around where best to use cards, what kind of content to include, and how much content.
Celebrate the wins!
Seems obvious, right? But in the midst of all the meetings, jam sessions, and hours glued to Figma, it’s truly exciting and rewarding to see my work come to life in product. To know the effort that myself and my collaborators put into releasing these features, and to know the impact they have on end user experiences, is definitely worth celebrating!