Portfolio for Jira redesign

Process

Now that we had understood why exactly users were struggling with the product, I wanted to make sure we knew exactly how product managers went about planning their roadmap today.

From this and other research, I formed an end-to-end user journey represented the typical product manager. With this in mind, I started to work through the flow in a low fidelity. These are just a few key screens that explore basic hierarchy and structure of the page.

Those initial interviewees were brought back to give feedback on the lo-fi end-to-end journey. Over the course of many rounds of feedback, I increased the fidelity and polished both the overall flow, as well as designing how smaller tasks would behave.

This project would end up spanning over a year from initial kickoff to launching to customers, so I will only include some of the most interesting or relevant parts of the process here.

Creating a customer guild for this change ended up being one of the most helpful and important parts for setting us up for success. This was a small invite-only group of a mix of existing and prospective customers who gave regular early feedback on the development of the new version of the tool. 8-10 customers were recruited for this and represented a range of industries, maturity, and familiarity with the existing tool. In an ideal case we could attract new customers without alienating existing ones.

Both large strategic decisions and smaller feature level problems were brought to the customer guild. A common way this might play out would be:

1. Initial discovery and enquiries with guild + other users to learn about a problem (e.g. How do you go about socialising roadmaps at your workplace?)
2. After turning those research notes into insights, I would then create initial design concepts for solving a certain flow or task. (E.g. a share roadmap flow where you can embed the result in a slide show)
3. A protototype or low-fidelity mock would then be brought back to the guild to get feedback on whether that would meet their needs and what changes could be made to better suit them.
4. I would work with the product managers to prioritise which set of changes would be best overall trade-off. For example, you might get a very specific request from 1 member of the guild because of their unique business, but it might not make sense to include in our product as a whole.
5. A refined design would then make its way into a future sprint or milestone. Once built, those guild customers could then try it out for real in their early-access preview and provide further feedback.
6. Depending on if that feature/flow met our goals (quality/impact), we could then move on to the next thing. If it wasn't working for the guild customers, it would be a signal that it'd be unlikely to work at full public launch too.

During this phase I would create, print out and put up in our working area these customer sentiment cards. By the end hundreds of these were hung up (wish I had a photo!). Here are a few examples of them.

You don't want a major change like this to disrupt existing users who are just trying to get work done. I worked with product management and engineering on defining this rollout strategy:

1. A invite only private alpha
2. An opt-in public beta
3. General availability (any newly created plans would be made in the new interface, but could be toggled off)
4. (As of writing has not occurred yet)Future sunsetting of the old interface

One of the most crucial decisions we made was that there would be no data loss between switching between the old and new interface, despite this actually requiring a bunch of backend changes. Although this added a decent amount of engineering scope, it gave customers confidence to try the new interface and reverse the decision if it didn't meet their needs yet.

Solution

The project spanned over a year and I created 80+ Sketch files in that time. I'll include some of the key screens. To get a sense of the product in motion you can check out a video like this one from Atlassian on YouTube. If you're curious about some of the drag and drop experience see the Interaction design case study .