ROLE
SKILL
TIME
NDA
TEAM
Sr. Designers, Design Directors
Engineering (all levels)
Product Managers
Global Brand Imaging (ICON)
Brand Marketing
THE CHALLENGE
Icon is essential to the creative production workflow. The front end framework (Angular) that Icon was built upon is no longer supported and Icon is not set up to meet the growing number of asset demands in the future, leading to a risk in Global Brand Imaging Operations. We want to deprecate angular and migrate to React (newly supported framework).
HIGH LEVEL GOAL
In this case, supporting more number and types of assets
THE STRATEGY
RESEARCH
There were our primary user groups that are involved in the creative production process as defined by product and our stakeholders that we collaborated with throughout the entire design process.
Research insights via auditing, surveys, and interviews with the ultimate goal to understand -
what is impacting imaging team’s workflow to get images produced from start to end, particularly challenges? AND why is it not scalable?
The goal of our auditing was to understand:
We analyzed across the entire ecosystem to understand ICON's functionality and features
From the auditing, we have decided to tackle ICON in 3 parts:
During our interviews with creative production users across the design process, we dove deep into understanding the following:
INSIGHTS
PIVOTAL DESIGN EXPLORATIONS
PIVOT 1
Teams have to do a lot of manual labor, with no efficient way to complete tasks in bulk efficiently.
Original Design
PIVOT 2
Teams spend a ton of wasted time trying to find what they need.
Original Navigation Design
This navigation hierarchy best represents the mental model of imaging team's search and filtering process to find the jobs they need quickly. First, they gain access to the right queue based on the team they are on (and permissioning) and then look for the status of a job followed by searching for specific details related to a job after.
PIVOT 2
Internal Edit jobs are done outside of ICON. This has led to fragmented systems, duplicative processes, reporting, and tracking. They want to include an internal edit jobs into ICON within our short migration timeline.
Original Navigation Design
This the current creative production flow for ICON.
Our imaging teams mentioned that they want to bring in internal edit workflow step (which are steps after external edits for reviewing images to make sure they meet quality standards). They prioritized this integration as critical and want it brought into the MVP stages of the rewrite project. Based on the insights, we mapped where in the flow internal edit would fit into the processs in order to help shape how it will be visualized in their journey.
We’ve conducted a user acceptance test for each MVP feature to ensure all necessary features function and do not have bugs. However, if I had more time to test further, I would assess primarily:
EVALUATION
WINS
We’ve conducted a user acceptance test for each MVP feature to ensure all necessary features function and do not have bugs. However, if I had more time to test further, I would assess primarily:
REFLECTIONS
It's important to design both in small details, thinking of the pixels AND also in the broader, larger ecosystem and think about the future implications of the designs. I have to constantly think - can this component flex to multiple products in the future? what if we have more actions enabled on the table action bar? how will ICON support video in the future?
At Nike, obsessing over craft was echoed everyday on our team. In all of my design work and components, sweating out the tiny details mattered. We thought about how users would interact with UI components and the importance of microinteractions in shaping their experience - what should the loading state be? where should users go to next? should there be a toast notification? how much space do we allocate? does it help communicate the relationship as we intend to?
To top it off, winning as a team has always been the center of my process. This applies to not just design but the entire organization - product and engineering as well. This has enabled me to become much better at conflict resolution and managing trade off conversations.
