A corporation the size of The Home Depot has hundreds of software and hardware systems overseeing the functions of the company – from retail inventory, project management, loss prevention, hiring, security, messaging, etc.
The Springboard application sought to be the Product management tool for KPIs and feature improvement suggestions associated with all of these varied systems. The product is one-part internal marketing for all their software products, and one part idea/product management for what's to come next.
Example use case: a floor manager has an idea that submitting orders for Point-of-Purchase (POP) merchandise from a mobile device would save valuable associate time. They could input this suggestion into Springboard, enter it into the "Associate Productivity" category, assign specific KPIs to the idea and assign followers to track it. It would enter the queue, be reviewed, and if approved be implemented.
In order to understand what data points would be necessary to track improvements, I created an Object Oriented (OOUX) view of all of the objects (e.g. feature, benefit, user, tag, etc.) that were associated with software and hardware systems.
In order to understand the users of this product, we interviewed of a number of associates. These interviews led to the creation of 3 main personas.
For this project, I was working as a contractor with Rocket Whale, a software boutique in the Atlanta area. I worked closely with both of the founders, getting feedback, designing multiple iterations and incorporating feedback.
I struggled with parts of this project, specifically the interaction patterns. While I learned a lot working with the Rocket Whale team, we had some fundamental difference of opinions when it came to actions the user could take – not that either was wrong, just different. I tend to present most options to the user in the UI, the lead designer on the project preferred to progressively disclose some actions on hover states or once a component had been interacted with.
While I believe these patterns are more in line with modern software, I still struggle with hiding actions in a kebob (...) menu or on hover state, but sometimes it’s necessary to keep the interface from becoming cluttered.