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Client
Adaptive Insights
Year(s)
2016
Goals
Improve product UX and elevate UX insights, deliverables, and perspectives within the organization
Overview
Adaptive Inisights, leader in Corporate Financial Planning and Analysis, is known for product usability. To maintain this stronghold–in light of growing competition, a legacy system, and an evolving user base–requires product evolutions and a strong UX roadmap. This was my focus.
UX Process & Agile
When I arrived, the organization had just switched from Waterfall to Agile. Possibly the primary cause of a very engineering-centric method of development, this often left UX as an afterthought. The result was a series of quality and design compromises felt by the user base and eventually by the business. In response, I mapped a visual representation of the UX process, showing the necessary steps involved in quality research and design, and how that works in an Agile environment. I also highlighted the benefits of this method. The resulting shift has improved product quality, production efficiency, and cross-team collaboration.
Cross-product Flow
With the idea of creating stronger ties between products within the Adaptive Suite, we designed a feature to select data on an excel-like grid and create a chart with one click. The user then had the option to save it to a dashboard to share with their organization.
Product Redesign
Our analytics product was known to intimidate and confuse consumers and was in dire need of updating. We designed new interaction models, a new interface and set out a roadmap to intelligently infuse the new product with rich functionality over time.
Grow the User Base
With growing our user base in mind, we set out to improve user engagement for a new user segment. To this end, we focused on three initiatives. The first is a Process Guide feature set, designed to provide a simple interaction model for occasional users. The second is extensive user research geared to unearth motivators for this particular audience. The third is simplification of primary interaction models within the product to reduce multiple points of friction.
Product Suite Evolution
Evolving the Adaptive suite of products from a UX perspective involves managing updates and enhancements across multiple tracks–balancing business objectives, available resources, and time constraints. The focus of this evolution involves applying insights from extensive research, modeling new interactions and creating fresh designs. An example is re-imagining suite-wide product navigation. New navigation designs eliminate outdated UX and UI paradigms, such as breadcrumbs and asset management screens, provide context-sensitive functions and enhance overall product interaction. The new model is easy-to-use and progressive, designed to reduce friction points, increase credibility, and convey to our growing user base our continued dedication to user experience and innovation.
