MAKER
Project & Audit Management For Creative Teams
Role: Lead Product Designer, Product Manager
Context: Web/Mobile App
Launch: Oct 2023
My individual contribution
I was the lead product designer and product manager on a cross functional team of designers, engineers, subject matter experts, and QA testers.
I concepted, researched, designed, prototyped, and led the implementation and launch of this web and mobile application. Following the design phase, I met weekly and communicated daily with our engineering team to ensure the project was delivered feature-complete, on time, and on budget.
Research
Interaction Design
Product Design
Product Management
___ PROJECT DETAILS
Understanding the project.
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MAKER
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MAKER is an internal and proprietary web app developed for a Fortune 500 company.
This case study is based upon the actual project, without revealing proprietary information. All stats and descriptions are real and based on work I actually did. While the visual design here is representative of my work on this project, the design has been updated to avoid infringing on a proprietary product.
About
MAKER is about empowering creative teams to focus on building compelling content rather than spending time on tedious administrative tasks.
It's an intuitive project and audit management app utilizing automation to guide workflows, ensuring HR guideline compliance and simplifying audits.
MAKER tackles challenges from a new Federated Learning Model (FLM) implementation impacting 200 Instructional Designers serving 30k+ employees across my company. With HR lacking a clear compliance process, MAKER mitigates risks, streamlines workflows, and generates an estimated annual value to my company of $16.8M through work-hour savings and penalty avoidance.
Design Challenge
I pitched this project after learning about new audit requirements from an Instructional Designer colleague. Our challenge was twofold:
Interpret HR Technology’s new mandate and create a compliant process to avoid costly fines (potentially over $100k per infraction)
Develop a solution that not only managed the increased workload but also simplified the designers' workflows beyond pre-existing standards
In short, we needed something that didn't just handle the new requirements but also made life easier for our designers compared to before.
Project tags
1
Product Manager
2
Product Designers
3
Software Engineers
2
QA
01/
CHAPTER
Research
___ KEY ASSUMPTIONS
Target audience.
Groups that could benefit the most from MAKER automation
Creative teams are great at driving innovation and expanding the horizon of what’s possible. They aren’t always great at the administrative stuff. For many creatives, doing work about the work is the least fun part of the job.
My team and I worked closely with our sponsor in HR Technology as well as numerous subject matter experts (SMEs) from our Instructional Design teams to better understand the requirements and pain points our solution needed to solve. Their insights were key in helping us make the right decisions around roadmap planning and feature prioritization.
Project Leads
Creative Teams
HR
Auditors
___ VALIDATING ASSUMPTIONS
Key findings & results.
100%
HR Technology
Has concerns about accessibility and risks of fines for each ADA/WCAG infraction
86%
Project Leads
Have concerns about organizing work in a compliant way
79%
Instructional Designers
Struggle with lack of defined HR compliance process and doing administrative work about the work
72%
Auditors
Require centralized documentation and simplified on-demand audit report process
___ QUALITY OVER QUANTITY
Feature prioritization.
MUST HAVE
High Impact
__Add and manage teams
__Create and manage workflows
__Gate workflow progress by approvals
__WORM Compliant (Write Once, Read Many)
__Upload files
__Send per-file approvals via MS Teams
__Generate Audit Reports
NICE TO HAVE
High Impact
__Access archived workflows
__Collaborator/approver notes
__Admin role access
__Process automation
__Quick workflow status view
__Internal Review Number (IR#) guide
__Archive/Reactivate on-hold workflows
EXPECTED
Low Impact
__Share workflows
__Join multiple teams
__User-editable background image
__Jira connectivity
__View collaborator details
__Assign pre-approved compliance approvers
UNEXPECTED
Low Impact
__Dark mode
__Integrate Microsoft Teams Chat
__Mobile application
___ COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Understanding the competition.
Build better - together
Jira Software comes out-of-the-box with the features and best practices agile teams need to develop and evolve their agile practices.
Make work make sense
Teamwork feels like less work with Mural, the secure, flexible, visual work platform purpose-built for collaboration.
Turn data into insights
Visualize data in compelling ways.
___ SERVICE DESIGN
Understanding the user experience.
Current State
It was gratifying to see that the project intake process I had redesigned for our Instructional Design teams was still providing a great experience.
Past progress
The pain began with artifact creation, with no standard centralized file storage process. Additionally, when an artifact was ready to launch, teams were resorting to tedious manual data entry on a spreadsheet in order to create their audit records for that workflow.
Current pain
Future State
The future-state of the Instructional Design process leverages MAKER to centralize and store all artifacts directly within the app via SharePoint Online.
Version control is maintained, and users can easily retrieve past content.
Approvals are handled with Microsoft Teams Approvals, integrated into MAKER for a seamless user experience.
Once a workflow is ready to launch, users no longer need to tediously enter information on a spreadsheet. Everything is handled automatically by MAKER.
Future functionality
INTERACTIONS
02/
CHAPTER
___ USER FLOW
Low fidelity interactions.
Primary Persona Types
The distinction between the different personas is based on their specific roles in the MAKER process, which will determine the accesses they need. For example, a Team Admin will have the ability to add or remove members from teams, while Auditors only need to access the Audit Report function of the app.
Team Members
Admins
Approvers
Auditors
03/
CHAPTER
EXECUTION
___ HIGH FIDELITY DESIGNS
Anatomy of an audit manager app.
AUDIT MANAGER 01
GO WITH THE FLOW
MAKER’s automated project and audit management process is a simple and intuitive way for creative teams to move artifacts from concept, design, Stakeholder review, Compliance, through product launch. MAKER gates progress by approval status, enforces file version control, and documents all relevant compliance information. The result is compliance reviews that are clean, meticulously documented, and free of human error. The app is easier and more intuitive to use than Jira, more organized than MURAL, and more aesthetically pleasing than Excel while guaranteeing artifact compliance and reducing project completion time.
Welcome Home…Screen.
Upon opening the app users are greeted with a streamlined overview of current workflows. They can immediately see the status of each workflow without needing to select a specific workflow.
Let’s Get Started!
Creating a new workflow is easy. Just hit “New” and start inputting information about your new workflow. You can:
Add Approvers
Link to a Jira Epic or Story
Set a target delivery date
And more!
Do the fun, skip the boring.
Creators are great at creating. Admin work? Not always so much. MAKER lets creators focus on developing artifacts. They upload files into MAKER one time, and the app handles the rest. What’s more, when linked to Jira stories are updated automatically! This is also great for creative teams that don’t use Jira but collaborate with other technical teams who do.
Teams are notified of each status change and can quickly address any updates needed to files that fail the approval process.
No more wondering where a file was shared, who has or hasn’t approved it yet, or if old versions are floating around in the ether. Everything moves from start to finish. Seamlessly.
AUDIT MANAGER 02
REPORTING FOR DUTY!
Archived view makes past workflows easily accessible should Teams need to review past work. Users can instantly toggle between “Active” and “Archived” view when needed.
Generating a report couldn’t be easier. Team Members or Auditors simply select the “Reports” tab, select a date range, tag in an Auditor (if desired), and hit “Generate.” A Report file is downloaded and sent to any tagged Auditors.
Archives have you covered.
Ever get questions about past projects? Need to go back and check who approved a file, or what date a project was completed? Maybe you need to find an old file. MAKER archives all past workflows and makes getting that info a breeze.
It’s easy to switch between Active Workflow and Archived Workflow views with a simple toggle. From here, team members can also easily reactivate on-hold workflows.
Generating reports is easy!
MAKER takes all the work out of preparing for an audit. Because MAKER already tracks and catalogues every piece of information needed at audit time, generating a report is as easy as typing in the date range and hitting “Report.” You can even tag an Auditor to send them a copy.
___ KEY FINDINGS
Measuring success.
What we did well
I proactively identified a problem that HR Technology didn’t even know they had! Without a clearly defined compliance process the company faced significant expenses in additional work hours needed to comply, as well as non-compliance risks due to human error. My solution not only solved the risks presented by these new requirements, I also improved creative teams’ workflow processes beyond what they were before. I worked quickly and efficiently with a relatively small team, and was able to deliver MVP1 as a feature complete product on time and on budget, with additional MVPs already mapped out for future features and improvements. In total, MVP 1 is making work easier for 200+ creative team members serving 30k employees and providing an estimated $16.8M/yr of value to the company in work hours saved and fines and penalties avoided.
What I learned
One lesson I learned through this process was about the mobile app. When doing our initial research users expressed an interest in a mobile companion app to complement the responsive web app. What we discovered through concept testing though was that most users had desk jobs and were at their computer much of the time. They preferred to interact with the app on their computer rather than their phone, and almost exclusively used the mobile app for notification purposes. This functionality was already achieved with the app’s integration with Microsoft Teams, so I determined the resources to further develop the mobile app were not warranted and deprioritize design/development. Fail fast. Learn. Improve.
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