Discovery

The Discovery phase marked the initial stage in the UX & Product design process. It encompassed business analysis, defining the problems to address, and collecting evidence and initial guidance for subsequent steps. This phase was crucial for understanding the client's context and establishing a strategy for the redesign project.

During this phase we delivered:

• Discovery Workshops; to uncover business and user requirements

• Design Audits; to help us understand the existing application and its complexities

• Competitor Analysis; to help us benchmark our client against other available solutions

• Design Studios; to motivate and inspire our client who until this point had never used design to their advantage
  
  

Define

The Define phase was centred on refining our focus and establishing a coherent global foundational model to steer the team's efforts. 

During this phase we delivered 5 design sprints that established:

• High-level global architecture

• Pivotal navigational patterns

• UI foundations and key universal design patterns

• Complex areas of functionality and interaction

Once we had wrapped up the design sprints, we had enough of a skeletal structure that would be worth validating with users. Testing was carried out internally by the client, however we advocated for a larger programme of research to be undertaken at a later date to help validate the more subjective features we had conceptualised. A backlog of research was maintained at all times to ensure the detail behind what needed testing was not lost.

Design

The design phase was dedicated to establishing a new UI direction for the clients platform, followed by the production of UI assets. This new direction received approval from the leadership team, after which we scoped out the specific UI elements and assets to be developed.

During this phase we delivered:

• Brand Audit; to understand which where there were gaps in the existing brand, and which directions to explore visually

• Design Direction; to showcase 3 ways the client could potentially take their application moving forward

• Visual Design; to create and visualise all components and patterns that piece together the entire application and showcase these in various full render mockups

• Design System; to document and systemise all of the design work that the development team would require to build out the application without too much guess work

  
  

Outcomes

Working on enterprise level applications with varied user groups, all who have a varied set of workflows is always going to be a complex challenge to solve. Throw in the fact that there was no room for a huge overhaul or building from the ground up, nor a large never-ending budget for user research and testing, we had to be pragmatic in our design choices, going that extra distance to make sure we have learned everything possible from each stakeholder and their interactions with customers. We remained empathetic to users' existing needs from our learnings and focussed on trying to make their day-to-day working lives easier.

Taking the stakeholders, who previously had been selling a legacy platform into customers who expected more, from absolute design novices to individuals who now understand the strategic advantage design can offer and who now champion design processes and its impact is a wonderful thing to have been a part of.