General Electric (NDA)
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Project Details
UX Interaction
Landon Oliver (me), Tim Shiou, Sabrina Mcclain
One Month
Overview
This project aimed to add a new feature within a larger platform to better assist stakeholders and leadership roles with specific processes within the application. My role was to lead a user research, ideation, and design iterations, working closely with the product and engineering teams to ensure a user-centered outcome.
Approach
Research and discovery
To understand the users needs, I conducted one-to-one interviews with various stakeholders and end users. This process revealed some serious pain points and opportunities for us to improve. My focus here was:
- Understanding the day-to-day for different leadership roles
- Identifying the workflow to hit daily goal target
- Tools being used to track critical information
- Gathering any additional feedback that could benefit the design process further
The outcome of this included a set of user persona cards and journey insights that informed the design direction I wanted to pursue.
Early Concepting
After analyzing the research findings, I worked with the product manager to sketch some initial concepts on a whiteboard. This allowed us to explore multiple layout options before moving to digital wireframes. Here I focused on:
- Structuring the experience to align with user expectations
- Exploring different information hierarchies
- Ensuring the designs were feasible within our current system constraints.
This resulted in a clearer vision for how the experience should function which in return, was ready for low-fidelity wireframing.
Wireframing & Prototyping
Using Sketch at the time, I created low-fidelity to high-fidelity wireframes to visualize the potential solutions. These were reviewed together with the PM and iterated on based on initial feedback. The key points that I focused on within these wireframes were:
- Translating the ideas from the whiteboard to tangible workflows
- Making sure the project flow aligned with design constraints
- Maintaining flexibility for future iterations (if any)
The outcome: A "version one" prototype built in collaboration with engineering, allowing us to test with users.
User Testing & Refinement
After the prototype was built, I demoed this to target users and gathered feedback on usability, clarity, and workflow efficiency. During the demo, I observed how users interacted with the design, identified areas that needed adjustments, and prioritized the changes based on the user impact. With iterative refinements made directly from user input, this ensured the final solution to meet those needs effectively.
Final Handoff & Learning
After final adjustments, I collaborated with the engineering team to ensure a smooth handoff. The final implementation incorporated user-driven refinements, which led to a more seamless experience. Some key things that I learned throughout this feature design is:
- Research drives better decisions
- Cross-functional collaboration accelerates alignment and goal success
- Iterative & Agile testing ensures user needs stay at the forefront of the design process
Reflections
This project reinforced the importance of user-centered design and iterative development. By being able to gain validation from early assumptions and then refining based on the feedback we received from users, we delivered an experience that improved user efficiency and usability for stakeholders, leadership roles, and end users across the company.