Recent Case Studies
Acquia Design System 1.o - from 3 products to one suite
DRIVING VISUAL ALIGNMENT & INTERNAL SUPPORT AND RESOURCE ALLOCATION
When I joined Acquia - there were 2 visually distinct “clouds”, our core Drupal Hosting Cloud, and the envisioned Marketing Cloud - 3 acquired companies that were trying to come together as one product. The business mandate was clear - create one solution out of the 3 products. I worked with product and engineering leadership to quickly establish measurable design goals and align the 3 products. I prioritized and drove the alignment with 3 different product engineering teams located around the world. I focused the design team by migrating to Figma, and establishing our design language and first design system. I worked closely with developers to establish a collaborative process and ensure that we delivered value to the business, and had a positive impact for our customers. Given that it was the middle of the pandemic - I am really proud of the team and how we all worked together during very stressful times. We were able to build a new modern visual language and aligned 3 products into one more usable and visually appealing product.
Before there were 3 products determined to be one seamless suite, very different experiences with navigation and CRUD based architectures.
After - one integrated experience
We focused on unifying the navigation in order to increase cross product visibility and support the business goals on one Marketing Cloud. We established a modern visual language as the first step and refined the experiences during development of each product.
We expanded the initial scope from one business unit to our core Drupal hosting product.
Acquia Drupal Hosting Cloud - Visual Refresh and Alignment
Before
Too many varients of typography (color, weight, height) make it difficult for users of a tasked based tool.
After Visual Refresh
Updated the typography, and application colors ensuring the focus of the page is on the core task canvas. Now, the user can quickly scan without having to adjust to background and text contrast.
iRobot Product Strategy
Generative Research & Design - Future Experiences (Future X)
8 weeks of generative design and research sprints focused on identifying unarticulated needs and customer insights. We created various stimuli to discover how people thought about cleaning. We started very broadly, and each week we took insights and built off them to further identify how we might focus the company and help our customers continue to purchase and habituate to having a robot in the home.
Key insights resulted in a fundamental shift in how we positioned the company, from robot autonomy to robot partnership. From a hardware first mindset to an experience first (user centered design) mindset.
Stimuli for generative research to understand how folks think about cleaning, their triggers, tasks and tools.
As we continued to do generative research, we looked into our customer data and pulled usage information to inform the user journey and identify how we might increase adoption over time by nudging our customers. “Progressive Autonomy” introduced the notion that it takes time to establish trust and lead to habituation.
Weekly Insight Themes
Each week we re-grouped to identify core themes based on insights we learned, we brought in existing customers and potential customers. Some of the learnings challenged company assumptions. When our customers talked about routines, we came to the realization that routines are not as fixed in real life as we thought. Folks don’t clean every day at the same time - life happens, so we needed to find ways for the robot to be more responsive to new triggers. We identified different features and new market positioning to focus on a partnership over robot autonomy.