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product Design

Type

Product Design (Product owner)
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Roles and Responsibilities

  • Defining scope
  • Planning tasks
  • Developing schedules
  • Time estimating
  • Documentation
  • Working with clients and users
  • Leading the design team
  • Leading the product design direction
  • Designing major functionalities and key workflows
  • Creating design system and design library
  • Coordinating end-to-end design process with a cross-functional team in full product development cycle
  • Monitoring and reporting progress
  • Reporting to CEO directly

Time

Jan 2018  -  Current
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Product Information

  • PolyAnalyst Web reports 
    • A browser-based data visualization tool, it is our featured software that works with PolyAnalyst™6.5 -- a data mining software.
  • Product Vision
    • Easily, intuitively, and rapidly generates a data visualization report to present data insights and findings for PolyAnalyst™ users -- professional data analysts and citizen data scientists.

Quick Jump

OverviewWhyWhoHowDaily work

Final Product

Before After

Why this product?

Confirm Product Vision

We worked with the CEO to define and build the product vision to set a clear overall goal for this product to direct and guide our following actions.

  • What are we trying to build and why?
  • Contraints
Easily, intuitively, and rapidly generates a data visualization report to present data insights and findings for PolyAnalyst™ users -- professional data analysts and citizen data scientists.

Who is this product for?

1. Research

Once the product vision was defined, I conducted researches in 3 major aspects:

Resource

Aim to have a full and clear understanding of the product.
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  • Current achievements
  • Resources & teams
  • Future resources
User

Aim to understand the people who will use the products and what they actually need. Find out the gap between current user and target user.
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  • Interviews
  • Survey
  • Contextual Inquiry
Competitive

Aim to understand industry standards and identify opportunities for the product in the given market segment.
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  • Direct competitors
  • Indirect competitors

2. Define the user

According to the findings from the researches, this is the phase that we turn all these findings into insights to help designers understand why they want, think or need that.

Persona

Identify key user groups and create representative personas.
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Willson

  • Professional data analyst
  • Provides consulting service for Kanon
  • Collects products online feedback
  • Conducts text analysis work to the daily update data source
  • Has a weekly meeting with his head to demonstrate his analysis results and data insights
  • Doesn't have a good sense of aesthetic
  • Only needs datatable to show his result, but his boss wants him to provide data visualizations
Empathy Mapping

Align the team on our user, build the border understanding of the "why" behind user needs and wants. And prioritize user needs.
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How I tackled the challenge?

1. Create a task pool - backlog

To find out the specific design work that we should do in the future, we've re-categorized all the documented requests, issues and complaints, and regrouped them into a doable design task.

Affinity diagram

Aim to find out the relationship between fragmented problems and grouped issues.
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  • UI problems
  • UX problems
  • Feature requests
  • Bugs

Problem found

During the research process, I found the implementation sequence was disorganized and inefficient. Across different function modules, we could see an obvious unbalanced degree of development.
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The development team's backlog:

  • from a bug reporting system
  • contains all kinds of tasks (UI/UX issue, feature requests, bug reports, etc)
  • the task priority was decided by requester's personal preference (clients, internal users, CEO, designers)
  • no one analysed, filtered, organized and prioritized these tasks in an universal principle or standard
  • It's an "Agile development process" without direction and principle


2. Build milestones

According to the expected achievements and key deadlines that we have confirmed, I broke the overall development process into 3 stages. Each stage has a clear goal to guide us what to do. We should conduct the work that could help us move toward the goal.
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3. Narrow down the scope

Ok to use

Minimum launch

  • After adding few features we could reach the end of the 1st stage soon
Easy to use

Design foundation

  • The design team starts working on fixing major interaction issues and the aesthetic problems, include the Color Assignment interaction, Sheet Navigation, Settings Menu structure, Color Scheme, Spacing System, Grid System, Typography, UI Guideline, etc.
More powerful

Feature adding

  • Now will be a good time to build new features to make our product more and more powerful.
  • Base on same design elements from the design library to maintain a consistent design from different designers.



4. Evaluate priority

We evaluated the priority of specific design tasks from our backlog base on the goal of each Milestone.

Importance

Get an overall understanding of the importance level of this product design project along with other design projects in our hand.
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Urgency

Clarify the urgency level of expected achievements and functionalities of this product design.
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Priority

Find out the work-priorities of the related teams from development department.
Prioritize the design task according to the importance level and urgency level.

Daily work as a design lead.

1. Agile software development - Iterative


Design task assignment
Assign the task to the designer with related strength to optimize the speed and quality of work delivery. For the lower importance and urgency task, I will assign it to the designer who wants to practice and improve relative skills.
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2 weeks Spring
Most of our design & development tasks are set to 2 weeks spring.
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Regular weekly meeting with Design team
Check progress and gain some critique from other designers.
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*Regular meeting with Dev. Team
To define the priorities and discuss the tasks to work on for the next couple springs.
Check the overall progress in the middle of the spring.
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*Kickoff meeting
To have a detailed presentation of the designs that developers are going to implement.
To set project-based direct connection between designer and assigned developers.
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2. Design quality assurance

Checkpoints
‍‍We have checkpoint in the end of each design phase. (research, ideation, testing, documentation)
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User needs vs. user testing results
‍‍I will review the collected user needs during research phase and make sure that user needs has been satisfied in correct degree in the final design.
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Create and maintain the design system
‍Make sure every designer used the same assets, icons, spacing rule, typography in their final documentation for the development team.
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