ROSS had gone through many changes over the past few years without an established design system, there were visible traces of individual styles that varied from one designer to another causing usability issues and inefficient release cycles. Moreover, user research was limited and inconsistent and didn't play a role in product decisions. When I joined ROSS, the team was preparing for Q3 sprint planning and my first priority was to help identify design requirements and a user-centric design process so that product team could write user stories and plan development and design sprints.
I partnered with the product team to plan and facilitate a company-wide design sprint in preparation for Q3 sprint planning. As a preliminary exercise, I interviewed our in-house SMEs to create a journey map that illustrated the workflows of our users, their pain points, business insights, technology constraints and opportunities for innovation.
I synthesized existing analytics data and raw customer feedback and defined four different user groups based on their familiarity with ROSS and experience with law. I used these archetypes to categorize raw data in our research backlog that I groomed and managed and used them throughout the design process to ensure needs of all user groups are considered and addressed.
While I was preparing for the sprint planning, our product team was synthesizing customer outcome interviews to define key problem statements and briefs in preparation for the cross-functional design studios.
I planned the agendas and activity formats for the design studios and facilitated the workshops where our cross-functional teams leveraged problem briefs and user interview insights prepared by the product team and user journey maps that I had created to ideate solutions for the most critical customer outcomes. We discussed feasibilities of each solutions and prioritized functionalities on a matrix of OKR impact and user impact.
Once we completed the ideation workshops and placed functionalities on a priority matrix, the product team synthesized created a list of MVP and blue-sky features. I realized that we couldn’t yet plan design sprints because we didn’t have alignment on a revised UX for the app, so I led a two week design sprint for our team to create low-fidelity mockups of the entire app including what we were going to build within the next couple of quarters, and I worked with the product team to identify design tickets for planning the sprints.
I facilitated a two week design sprint where our design team worked on a refreshed IA and main navigation, a grid layout that was scalable to include future features such as user notes and highlighting, cross linking of documents and similar functionalities and concepts for search and result page with upcoming features. Considering we would need to do further user research and validation on each user story, we provided just enough fidelity for the product team to be able to plan sprints as accurately as possible.
