Darren Sorrels

What is project Greylens?

Using an Agile Design approach, myself along with a team of designers, developers, and subject matter experts (SME) designed and developed a cloud-based platform to allow builders to construct their designs and get pricing on the materials needed for the project they created.

The application is in the beta phase of development as of my last known working on the project.

Roles

This was a collaborative project where I served as one of the UX designers. We shared the following roles for this project.

UX Designer Consultant
Interaction Designer
Design system Lead
UX Strategy facilitator

The Challenge

The company Greylens (the name we will use for NDA Compliance), came to us with a need for updating their current business application to use the modern tech capabilities to improve efficiency in their manufacturing and design process. They were noted to be about 20 years behind in terms of software used for their current platform, but in software years that feels more like 1000 years.

Our team needed to bring their current application up to speed in a very short amount of time(3 years). We started by bringing their current application from the desktop to a cloud-based browser to provide access anywhere there was a connection to the internet.

Process

Since this project is under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), I cannot show talk about the work on this project in detail.

We use the design thinking strategy to accomplish the goals for this project:

Understand -> Research -> Analyze -> Design -> Launch -> Test

Understand

We did a How Might We (HMW) exercise to try to understand what the goals of the business were for their users as well as what the users needed from the business application. Here's some of what we found.

How might we:

Improve our users' capability to create and test the viability of their buildings quickly?
Allow users to use our application to complete/refine their work on site?
Help users get a quote on material cost quickly and make edits and refinements

Research

Most of the findings for the project were done before I was added to the project but I will identify the insights I observed even after the preliminary research was complete.

Most of the companies users were not very familiar with their existing application UI and needed the company to create buildings for them!
Users were having trouble keeping track of the iterations of their projects in the current application and had struggled with sharing their work with other members of their teams
Greylens employees were struggling with keeping track of the project status and keeping pricing accurate for the materials they created for their users.
This led to back-and-forth discussions and frustrations over project costs and timeline issues.
The current application didn't have a strong information hierarchy and users struggled with the learning curve needed to use the existing app well.

I discovered in my time on the project that not only were there platform improvements to be made, their application design and workflow for user interaction needed to be re-thought as well.

We did war-room style workshops to evaluate their user tasks needs and used design thinking techniques to discover their user journeys. It looked a little like this image below, but this is a photo from UnSplash so you can visualize the idea.