How could we provide a comprehensive workflow platform experience that addresses individual needs?

One of the more important, but often overlooked, challenges facing organizations and their customers is a disparate portfolio of products that is inconsistent in layout, meaning, interaction, and approach to common tasks. To address this, many companies quickly jump into creating a platform and design system without effective planning, which brings its own set of challenges and may not solve their users’ or business needs.

TeleTracking Technologies faced similar issues. When I starting working with the company, their products had numerous inconsistencies in function, layout, interaction, and meaning. Colors and icons, for example, had distinct meanings in different applications, workflows, and associated content. In addition, customers were experiencing individual products and not the company as a whole, often stating "I use [product name]." instead of “I use TeleTracking."

To address these issues, I launched a platform experience initiative with the goal of unifying all products into one cohesive, role-based platform. To get a clearer picture of the existing state of each product, my team and I conducted extensive user/stakeholder research and documented a full design inventory.

Based on our findings, we created reusable patterns for the redesigned experience including standardized language, colors, and iconography as well as broader cohesive workflows. I directed my team to create a common navigational structure that was configurable to the specific client and individual user along with the products/features they were using at that time. When each new product launched or a major iteration was released, we applied the new platform experience to it.

As we continued to evolve and expand the platform, we developed a living design system to support it named Mosaic. This system formalized the platform experience based on our core principles followed by design guidelines, style foundations, and reusable components. These core principles were an essential foundation to our overall customer and platform experience by providing a common language and vision along with key questions to ask as teams identify problems and develop solutions.

A key differentiator of Mosaic was its integrated workflow that spanned the entire software development process from the original design files to final production code. This allowed for minor changes to the source design, such as font size or color, to be seamlessly applied across the portfolio behind the scenes without diverting software engineers from more complex tasks.

There’s more to explore…

Read about my work leading and creating solutions that meet real user needs.