Background
Within my first month at Igloo, I was given a challenge - design a native app experience to compliment the core web product due to a rapidly changing landscape of work and the growing demand from customers. The fun part was that the contractor was starting the following week to begin development.
What I did
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Immediately started joining both sales and customer success calls to understand the problems organizations were facing and how our product provided solutions. I wanted to learn current use of the product and the context behind common interactions.
- Worked with our internal database team to gather data. What were the most common content types published by customers? What were the most viewed types of content by users? What types of information were being published?
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Exposed myself to the product. I was still learning the breadth of the product I was expected to design. I immersed myself in task flows and use cases I had learned about during my research.
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Identified technical constraints with Product and Engineering. We needed to know what current functionality was supported, what would work sub-optimally, and what would not work with the current platform at present.
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Collaborated with the Customer Success team to recruit a core group of customers that were committed to providing employees for bi-weekly usability testing of rapid prototypes. I Implemented Lean UX methods to perform weekly testing of prototypes to validate hypothesis and iterate on product development. I then shared the lessons learned from each round of testing to raise the level of customer empathy and provide updates on the direction of the product.
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Worked with remote development team in Europe as the sole designer to provide user stories and design deliverables for both iOS and Android development. The product was launched in February 2017.
