Discovery and Ideation

During my initial steps, I primarily focused on meeting the Dev team and the stakeholders of this initiative. The purpose of these meetings was to discuss the pain points and goals of this project. We also prioritized use cases and flows within the agreed timeline.

The current solution

The application has been facing numerous issues that are frequently reported by its users. The app's complex and dense hierarchy, coupled with outdated designs, has resulted in a lack of findability and difficult user journeys.

One of the primary issues with this application is that it was developed quickly without the aid of specific research or collected user data. The development team pieced it together, bit by bit, and eventually released it as a whole.

Given the nature of the app, the primary focus should be on organizing its architecture and data clusters, as well as simplifying the most crucial user flows.

Research

The research process began immediately by conducting user interviews to gain a better understanding of their experiences. The interviews were divided into two parts: the first was to gather insights into their current experience with the app, including their main needs and pain points. This was achieved through user interviews and usability testing.

The second stage relied on user interviews and involved shadowing the users in their day-to-day tasks (in and out of the platform) to gain insights into their internal processes, work procedures, and any possible blind spots that may not have been identified before.

Adding, editing, and deleting a team member were some of the main flows of this platform, as well as creating and managing the structure of PIs.

One of the main issues identified was the platform's dense and impractical information architecture, which made navigation difficult.

This issue extended itself beyond the navigation UI patterns (side menu, breadcrumbs, etc) but also to the navigation experience itself (especially focusing on the reverse navigation - hierarchical and chronological).

To solve this, the first thing to do was to establish the information architecture of the platform and the hierarchical clusters.

Another pain point encountered was the dissonance of page layout between add, view, and editing modes. This gap in the experience caused some confusion to the user when editing content.

Additionally, the “auto-save” feature added even more friction to the experience because of the lack of system feedback upon the applied changes.

By implementing a closed editing system, users are only able to apply changes once they click "Save", resulting in receiving a system notification and making sure their work is kept.

PI manager

The revamp of the PI manager was one of the biggest challenges.
I focused on a drag-and-drop system so the user has visibility of the entities on both sides - assigned and unassigned assets - at all times for better management control, as well as search inputs on both sides to make selection faster.

“(…) I can safely say that Maria has been a great asset in all the work fronts that we requested from her. Without any previous knowledge about the work she would have in hands, she dived right into the application.

From the small number of meetings we had she was able to quickly grasp the use cases we were covering as well as the limitations we were facing. Not only that, but she challenged our approach to some scenarios that otherwise we wouldn't have questioned. To have the capability of quickly assessing the situation and gather information from it is a skill that complements her work greatly. (…)”

— Rui Almeida, R&D Tech Lead

The goals of this project were successfully achieved and users reported having a better experience and easier navigation throughout the platform.

A big thank you to everyone involved in this project, especially the Internal Apps team.

Client

OutSystems

Date

2022

Internal Directory App

The Engineering Organisation Management (EOM) tool is an internal application developed for managing and structuring the Engineering Department, as well as building the current and future Product Increments.