My role: Product Design Intern
Duration: Jan-May 2022 (5 months)
Tasking and Processes Team
Designer, PM, Engineers, UX Research
Figma, Slack, Miro, monday.com
is a multinational SaaS company that offers a variety of financial reporting solutions for businesses.
This spring of 2022, I interned at Workiva as a Product Design Intern in the Tasking and Processes team. My team helps to design and automate workflows to add flexibility in the data collection workflow. I delivered a new flow of certification process that helps to make tasking and certification process more efficient and automate workflows to add flexibility in the data collection. (Released in Q1 of 2023)
As a lead designer for this project, my role consisted of:
When you need to manage a signer or approval process, Certifications helps you get information and sign-off from key players. Certifications allows you to establish standard and repeatable steps for an efficient, timely and transparent process. The status of the Certifications process is tracked with the aid of a dashboard and reports.
I started this project by learning about Certifier. I had meetings with another designer on the team as well as the PM to learn the history and design decisions. Then I explored Certifier myself and watched customer calls recordings. These steps helped me map out the existing user flow.
I participated in 4 customer calls with other UX researchers in the team to understand their needs and pain-points with current certifier process. Based on that we prepared user persona for signer, approver, process owner, and status reviewer.
Based on the user need we conducted a brainstorming session with all the team members and PM. During the storymap we uncovered what are the features we could add in the next generation certifier which would solve the customer problems. As a team we agreed to add bulk edit, add multiple assignee and approver, set due date, and auto approval.
Since, this is a huge project we figure out the main 3 elements in the Next Gen Certifier which would be helpful to create the full certification process .
Allowing users to bulk update due dates quickly and easily will create a better experience by removing a pain point for our customers; it would significantly reduce the amount of time spent updating fields with the same value.
"When I presented the my work during UX Sync meetings, I heard positive feedbacks and aligned product directions. Some of my proposed designs were part of the product development direction and some features like Multi user actions and Scheduling the task were even already released."
How to communicate complex ideas
The scope of my project was quite large. There was a lot of ambiguity, strategic considerations, and possibilities for this new feature. This challenged me to learn how to communicate complex ideas into easily understandable concepts and adapt my storytelling based on my audience.
How to effectively lead cross-functional meetings
As an intern, it was hard for me to drive meetings, especially with cross-functional partners. I had to learn how to set and follow meeting agendas, stir conversations back to the agenda when needed, and decide action items needed from different cross-functions in order for me to progress on design. It was nerve-wracking to tell cross-functional partners what to do, but I quickly learned how important it was for the success of the project.
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