Data and Subscription Access Manager (DSAM)
2019
Team size: 4
Role: Lead Designer, Front-End Developer
The Board Research Library plays a fundamental role in procuring and disseminating resources to my division in the Board of Governors. These resources include subscriptions to products and services.
The Research Library realized their current methods for maintaining user lists was time-consuming, inefficient, and tedious as they have hundreds of subscription services with a growing list of subscribers and constantly-changing information on those subscribers, which are managed by 6 librarians.
I was tasked as being the Design Lead, working with a Project Manager and two developers, to implement a solution to save time and improve accuracy of the user lists using our group's existing capabilities for automation of many of the tasks.
List accuracy and quick turnaround is also critical for confidential dataset management, a separate service that had potential to be integrated into the product. Thus, it was also my role to research ways confidential dataset management could also be incorporated.
First, I sought to understand the problem by meeting with the users through one-on-one interviews to gather their pain points. I asked to also get access to their spreadsheets in SharePoint as well, and I spent time looking through them, seeking to understand the data librarians’ mental model of using these spreadsheets.
After collecting as much information on the current system as possible, I created a user workflow laying out the existing process to visually understand pain points and reveal needs within the system.
I investigated modern tools that are being used today as potential solutions, since industry standards tend to be well tested and reliable to get inspiration from. The investigation was also necessary to explore off-the-shelf solutions that could potentially be utilized rather than building a product from scratch.
I also interviewed data asset SMEs from around the organization to collect information on similar internal tools that could potentially be leveraged. And I created and used the summary insights to create user stories so that our tasks and goals were well understood by the team from a user centric standpoint.
I worked closely with the PM to write out the user stories and translated them to corresponding development tasks on the scrum board in Jira. She held sprint planning meetings every 2 weeks to assign work. We kept each other up to date on progress and kept the task board statuses updated as the team met in daily stand-up meetings.
We used the user stories to analyze functional groups to get a bigger picture understanding of the types of features that will be prioritized into the design.
We later created additional user stories to incorporate confidential dataset management.
I worked with technical team members to list out the complete set of metadata fields needed for tracking in the system and sent them to the clients for feedback and approval so that we’d have the full set of required fields laid out and their relationships before designing the IA layout of a proposed solution.
I later updated the views to include confidential dataset fields.
After it was deemed that a custom application was the best way forward, I created a set of wireframe sketches and tested the potential interface and page flow with the users and iterated on the feedback.
After a couple of iterations, I designed high-fidelity mockups. I showed the mockups to the users once more to validate, then annotated them before handing them over to developers to implement the basic structure layout and back-end architecture.
After the developers implemented a basic layout and functionality of the views, I added styling and enhancements to the code, primarily using CSS, and updated the visual design through color, typography, spacing, and logo creation using our Bootstrap-based Design System.
To validate the implementations, I then created QA scripts based on the user stories to allow the tester to go through all possible scenarios and verify they are able to accomplish each of their goals.
We first went through these tests internally with a couple of team members, fixed any problems found, and sent the test script to the key stakeholders to test with. I decided on this approach because these particular stakeholders are meticulous with following these written out tasks and reporting back in a detailed manner, whereas other users may have needed more handholding through a facilitated session to go through the scenarios.
Passing every scenario was counted as our success metrics as well.
I worked with the PM to record issues that did not pass and evaluate whether fixes were required to be implemented as part of this project iteration.
The resulting product we launched met our business goals, while also exceeding expectations of users resulting in a delightful user experience because they really felt heard. It let to a green-light of the next phase of the project to fully implement the confidential dataset management features that were designed and tested.
There was definitely an unanticipated cost and growth opportunity for the team as a result of giving our stakeholders more than they thought they needed. The key takeaway was reminding ourselves “you are not the user”. The team had gotten used to relying on assumptions a lot because they’ve been so successful at it, however, without data, it can lead to heated disagreements among team members, which we learned from.
