THE TICKET

After a successful sale, we’re ready to get working on the client’s requests. 

More mind-reading. As you will see the ticket attached is about as detailed as things get written. One of my faves, the ‘make prettier’ request, which later was renamed to ‘make snazzier’. This ticket serves as a reminder to hold your product manager and their superior PRD writing skills dear. Because as you will see, not having a dedicated PM results in requests generated over teams on the fly.

The homepage

When the work environment isn’t necessarily design-, or user-centric, one must often show all pixel-perfect examples before a conclusion/direction can be made. Also because of lack of time and resources, using wireframing tools like Balsamiq, or building interactive prototypes in Figma, Flinto or Invision are an extraneous leisure. An interestingly new challenge I face being on such a small design team is working with stakeholders who aren’t necessarily tech or product savvy. They may not know full feature sets, technical capabilities, and/or terminology like pixel sizing, fonts. Some are not even familiar with the phrase ‘above the fold’. Often many may have strong opinions on aesthetics, and/or might not understand the balance between too much or too little content.

The homepage design was a prime example of such content creation conundrum; a great example of how homepage content needed to be laid out to visualize that more is not better.

Oh, hey! Remember that ‘blank-ish’ Ticket?

Here, let me remind you. It states we need designs for: Home page, profile page, assessment page, insights page, chat page… Make p-r-e-t-t-i-e-r… do we see metrics, deadlines, milestones, {insert important req here}? Not quite. So, plowing through the nebulous gray of what is required, let me turn on my mind-reading skills and preface the nest steps as they are not conventional or best practice in any form. You won’t find sticky notes or whiteboard drawings. Heck, you won’t even find a PRD, because frankly, like my blank tickets, epics and user stories, they don’t exist, and we don’t have the time, or team capacity to facilitate wires and sketches.

Ticket translation… we need quite a few more screens in various states for desktop AND mobile, not to mention assets. And what is this product?

1. What is the product? ‘OBSCURENAMECLIENT’ was sold existing executive leadership coaching services with a custom web experience. The big driver here is the possibility upon a successful first run to close a multi-year deal. The build includes said client’s proprietary skills and traits assessments, and hand-selected learning courses, and the opportunity to schedule executive leadership development sessions
   
   The promise: Our technology can facilitate, our industry-leading coaches contribute to leadership growth, our product is straightforward enough for a user.

2. The homepage needed a design overhaul to remove two key features while adhering to the tech constraint that we MUST keep the right hand, gray widget rail as is. (Even though alternatives for a better UX had been proposed as you’ll see on the right).

3. To address the ‘prettiness’ factor I tried to bring some white space, and a more modular layout, while sticking to existing tech and design constraints. For example, the blue ‘Journeys’ tiles, were a remnant from a ‘Discover Journeys’ design exploration that ended up being introduced into the homepage across all partners without testing, or user flow and experience expectations. Another constraint is the inclusion of not fully functional features like ‘Quick Wins’ and ‘Goals’.

4. A new FAQ page with some typography tweaks, an assessments page, a chat and support page with updated icons and background design, the learning landing page, the SSO prelogin page, and profile pages were quickly reskinned, images replaced according to feedback from our internal sales team, including ‘make it more snazzy’ (!!). Yes, you read that right. Now my visual and brand brain power needs activation.

5. Now I’m also required to mind read which additional assets that support this executive leadership experience are needed. In this guess after a few phone calls and emails we needed: Image placeholders for the external learning site, email image assets, error states, modals, icons, hero images, and a few more pages with specific detail changes (copy, colors, logos).

Conclusions

Every now and then I hear back from corporate on how the product actually launched, and was received. Sometimes with insight into how many people contributed to pitching, selling, launching, and maintaining the product. (I even got a acrylic award block the size of a guinea pig a while back for my work contribution on launching this particular department’s B2C product).

What you may not know: our design team is a whole two person crew, of my my very talented UX director, and myself. You might have noticed the turnaround time (here about 4 months), and some of the major process constraints I work with. PRDs, success and exit criteria, KPIs, milestones, target dates, changelogs, checklists, scope, reporting, documentation, user testing, market research and viability, even accountable stakeholders are often unclear – if available at all.

So, can I read minds? Not, really. I will try to find some sort of process in a process-less space.

I’m not a dev, and my coding skills are limited. I’m originally a graphic designer, with an entrepreneurial spirit who finds joy in organizing chaos (whether that is data, systems, or the likes) into visually stunning but also functional entities. I have good gut instincts, decently high emotional intelligence, the power of being able to strategically think while constantly thinking of brand and its application, and what it takes to get things done in a crunch.

Want to see more of what I’ve worked on at Korn Ferry Advance? Click the button below.

Some easter egg projects – lacking a lot of description – can be found here.