Developing a platform to help the users and the business achieve their goals
Role: Product Design Lead
10+
Multidisciplinary team
6
Months Design Effort
3
Discovery Workshops
8
User interviews
26
Responsive UI flows
2
Design team
The Context
As a product designer, I led this platform's design, ensuring its usability, feasibility, desirability, and ethics.
The company's founders had been working in the motor industry for many years and clearly knew the business model and the product they wanted to build. This product was a platform for helping companies who employ drivers stay compliant with government regulations by checking their driver's licences, insurance documents and vehicle details.
The client had the idea for the product, but this had to be built from scratch and facilitate the company to go to market as fast as possible. In addition, they didn't have a company name or brand guidelines.
As a product designer, I led this platform's design, ensuring its usability, feasibility, desirability, and ethics.
Goals and Tasks
My role as design lead was to help the client develop their product from scratch, help them go to market, and facilitate collaboration between design development and stakeholders throughout the design thinking process.
I collaborated with a team of designers, developers, account managers, the company founders and their team.
Output goals
- Deliver designs for the platform with the planned features.
- Create a brand style (logo, style guide, design system)
Outcome goals
- Improve the client’s processes by automation and making the platform easy to use.
- Help the company go to market with a clear differentiation from its competitors.
Learning goal
- Understand the business, user personas, tasks performed by each persona, and their goals and pain points.
Actions
1 - Discovery: company/product vision, brand, vision prototype
After an initial meeting between the founders and my company's team, I proposed to identify the primary users of the platform and map that information on user journeys. I also facilitated a brand workshop with the founders to work on the overall vision and future for the product and, from there, the brand personality and look and feel.
2 - Concept prototype
I worked with the founders to identify the product's value proposition, create an initial hypothesis and test it with a prototype.
I facilitated a design workshop including the founders and members of my team, from design, account management and development. As a result, we came up with a concept prototype that we showed to actual users of the platform that were introduced to us by the client.
I conducted semi-structured interviews to gather feedback and learn more about the pain point and desires of these users and produced a report that I presented to the team a few days later.
3 - Design process: research/requirements/prototype/test/design system/handover
As a team, we used the project's concept prototype and initial feedback as a north star. Then, we started to work in detail on the features that would form our platform according to what we learnt about users' tasks, needs and pain points and following a roadmap outlined by the founders and the client management team.
The design process was a collaboration between the designers, the client and the engineering team. First, we analysed the tasks performed by users, created wireframes, and each design underwent a few rounds of client and user feedback. Then the designers would develop high-fi responsive screens and reusable components for the design system. Lastly, the designers would facilitate handover meetings with the engineering team
Results
The team delivered the design not only including the planned features requested by the client but with the added value we could identify thanks to the design-led discovery process.
The main improvements were:
- Unlike the competitors, this platform gives information and suggests actions to fix issues or make the user aware of what's coming next.
- Using task analysis, we automated many users' tedious manual processes of sending emails and notifications.
- We improved usability by providing users to find information quickly with a robust search and filter function and quick links to the most used features.
- We created a reporting system flexible for each user's needs and replaced spreadsheets with visual reports.
Projects
About me
Contact
lautecce@gmail.com