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Challenge

Veryon (formerly ATP), a ~250 employee B2B SaaS company with 50 years in aviation, acquired Casebank Technologies in 2017. Casebank's flagship product, SpotLight, was a desktop browser-based guided troubleshooting tool used by aviation, automotive, and heavy equipment maintenance technicians. Despite the potential for its case-based reasoning engine to make troubleshooting faster, SpotLight revenue was increasingly missing targets.

In mid-2019, as Head of UX, I was asked to focus Design resources on the newly acquired product. Casebank's product culture had been sales and technology-driven, and there was skepticism of human-centered design. Research, it was flatly stated, slowed things down. Asking too many questions of customers would make us look like we weren't domain experts.

Process

Project kickoff workshops are a great way to establish situational awareness, so I invited senior Sales, Support, Engineering, and Product Management colleagues to the group's first-ever cross-functional design workshop. B2B software adoption problems tend to arise from trust (bad data, instability, etc.) and/or fit (usefulness, access, etc.). I facilitated a user journey mapping exercise to capture what the team collectively knew about how and when the tool was used in typical customer workflows. Internal misalignment about the user journey became clear, and this convinced the group to finally engage in user research.

Mixed Methods: Ethnography, Usability Testing, & Standardized Questionnaires

The Director Of Product Management and I formed a close partnership and quickly dispelled a belief that access to end-users would be impossible. Customers were happy to see our product team visit them, and in one case, we secured badges providing virtually unrestricted access to airline technicians as they worked in hangars. The team interviewed, shadowed, and conducted onsite usability testing with dozens of maintenance technicians across the entire customer base in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.

Action

The emphasis on defect history analysis (learning!) during troubleshooting was a revelation. SpotLight's sister product, ChronicX, provided defect trending for reliability teams. ChronicX employed natural language processing and machine learning to analyze written defect descriptions and classify them as a means to alerting customers to otherwise hidden repeat fix attempts. My Product Management partner and I proposed that the classification algorithm could be leveraged to mimic how experienced technicians analyze and process history to pursue likely fixes and get equipment back in service more quickly.

The industry trend toward tablets was an opportunity to port the legacy troubleshooting engine to an app, and in the process, merge the AI classification features into the workflow.

Designers used Adobe XD to prototype how to blend and modernize features from both product lines. The team conducted evaluative concept testing using Optimal Workshop. We iterated with Engineering's input. Veryon released the beta to an early adopter program in March of 2021, a little more than a year after I introduced human-centered design into Casebank's work stream.

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Outcomes

Technician response to the beta was exceptional. The early adopter program translated into sales sooner than expected based on technician recommendation. The new troubleshooting tool, now called Veryon Diagnostics, had pushed the product line to 189% of plan by end of the following quarter - even in a world still reeling from the pandemic. Ongoing evaluations using the Software Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire revealed user perceptions of usefulness and usability in high 80s.

By using "just enough" research, the Design team showed a skeptical business unit how human-centered design can take a product from good to great. We helped maintenance technicians level up by introducing artificial intelligence into their work, and stalled sales revenues began to move in the right direction again.

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Challenge

Veryon (formerly ATP), a ~250 employee B2B SaaS company with 50 years in aviation, published technical maintenance documents into their flagship web content product, the Aviation Hub, via a cobbled-together mix of in-house and third-party software hosted on aging local servers. Document processors published new documents in a multi-system, multi-step slog that concluded with a time-consuming and error-prone database "build process" performed once or twice a week.

When system failures began regularly impacting customers, product management made the case to upper management to invest in replacing the system with a cloud-based application. The project aimed to streamline and modernize the entire publishing workflow, ensuring seamless, real-time content updates with the stability of the AWS cloud.

Process

Workshop! As Head of UX, a new role, I persuaded the Aviation Hub's Director of Product Management to let design take the lead - a new way of working. I presented a plan to kick things off with a Design Studio discovery workshop.

Representatives from product management, engineering, design, and a contingency of the production team (the users!) connected for a 3-day workshop to agree on the real Jobs to Be Done of the people who would use the new tools. My facilitation combined Stanford d.School Design Thinking and Object Oriented UX ORCA activities. Together, we mapped the flow of publication, boiling it down to its simplest constituent phases: intake to metadata application to document processing to QA and release.

This is going to fail, a tenured production analyst commented at the conclusion of the Design Studio. We've tried to do this before. The data is just too complicated.

Challenge accepted.

The outcome of the Design Studio included a high-level set of requirements, the seeds of a basic information architecture, and a charter for how we would continue to work and measure success. It was agreed that a smaller set of the Design Studio group would continue to meet nearly daily to iterate and test Axure RP wireframe prototypes. Engineers participated from day 1, but coding happened gradually to allow concepts to gel. High resolution mockups were never created. Late in the process, my design team provided HTML/CSS page mockups to illustrate key styling concepts. Eventually, Veryon's Design System styling would be applied.

Beginning with the basic taxonomy created in the Design Studio through wireframing (Axure and lots of whiteboarding ) and on to the production code that launched not quite a year after the Design Studio, the empowered cross-discipline team of collaborators stayed tightly connected at every step to completion.

Outcomes

The objectives of the project were to eliminate the manual build process and migrate to the cloud. We successfully delivered:

• Real-time content updates: The new system allowed data to be available to customers within an hour, compared to the previous delays of several days. This was expected.
• Cloud migration: This reduced downtime risks and provided scalability for future growth.This was also expected.
• Increased efficiency: After a few months, the production team saw a nearly 90% improvement in processing efficiency with fewer errors. This result surprised the old guard management team. The improvement was attributed to our participatory design strategy which became a fixture in this product line's process and future projects.

Through close, persistent collaboration, we designed the interfaces to match the mental models and processes of the people (not the system) doing the job. We helped document processors be better at what they do.

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Challenge

Ford Motor Company wanted to go big for its 2015 model year Mustang. The changes to the vehicle platform would be big, and the way it would launch would be big. They wanted to introduce the same model, with all its glorious changes, in all markets at the same time, a feat no automaker had attempted. Every detail in every piece of its global advertising strategy had to be exceptionally tight to help ensure the launch was a success. Ford partnered closely with its primary ad agency, Team Detroit, to pull off an exceptional launch.

Process

I had recently joined Team Detroit (now GTB) as a Senior UX Architect because I wanted work that, from afar, seemed somehow more. Team Detroit was respected. Its creatives were among the best in the world. Ford was a strong brand made stronger by great brand experiences.

Two of Team Detroit's most senior UXers (myself included), several creative directors, and a handful of engineers were organized to develop a single landing page that would announce the new vehicle. We were provided talking points and a list of the car's features - and told to make some magic. I was immediately impressed with the creative directors' skill at inventing hype from almost nothing. We spent hours mulling over approaches to imagery and wording. One of the creatives, an exceptionally talented artist, presented a paper layout sketch, and we applauded. It seemed to hit all the marks. An internationally known photographer was hired to take shots of the car in a variety of both exotic and familiar locations. Many of the images were constructed with CGI. One of the creatives hated a key photograph, and the expensive photographer was sent out again to retake the shot with the car at a more appealing angle to the camera.

In this environment and at that time, creatives were king. UXers provided insight into usability heuristics but were otherwise really there to capture layout ideas as wireframes in Axure RP. The wireframes would be part of the official record of requirements from which engineering would later construct the page. The flow of information across the teams was what it needed to be for the job.

Outcomes

The 2015 Mustang launch was a great success story for Ford. They pulled off the incredible feat of creating a globally appealing vehicle concept. I was proud to see the new vehicle's landing page on Ford.com mentioned in the trades, and I recall lots of congratulatory messages. Our team had contributed to something big.

But, despite all the excitement and sexiness, I was unfulfilled. Did Ford sell more Mustangs because of our work? Did the page communicate what we thought it did as well as we thought it did? We didn't know and it didn't seem to matter. What mattered was that management and the larger industry thought the page looked great. This did not fit the research-based tool optimization work I had been focused on. I began to miss enterprise UX work. I missed honing in on usefulness and usability. I missed making things measurably better over time. We didn't do any of that, and though it was indeed big, it felt somehow less.

After a few more similar successes, I left Team Detroit. It remains my shortest stint at a job; I had been there less than a year. I was bored, and I felt what they were doing was somehow the antithesis of good UX. They were focused entirely on surface, and I believed UX should be more about what's under the surface. In my mind, they were failing, but also, deep down, I wondered if it was me that had failed. I didn't understand advertising.

I have since come to understand that there are a variety of purposes layered into digital work. B2B, B2C, enterprise, advertising, eCommerce, gaming, etc., etc., - every context has a unique set of needs and produces different kinds of value. All products are tools; tools have different kinds of uses. There are designers who love and are very, very good at advertising and hype-building, but I wasn't one of them. My place is tool-building, but I've come to appreciate the importance of my hype-building experiences as part of my tool set. Demos, am I right?

I can now look back at the experience fondly. It made me process something I perceived as a personal failure. I have learned the value of hype-building, especially in enterprise product work where the buyer usually isn't the user and we need to excite two audiences. At a glance, people should be able to imagine how a thing is going to make people better. Balanced attention to surface - hype-building - is now a standard UX requirement for my teams, even in enterprise tool building work.