Influencing product priorities through service design

spotlighting front- and back-end technical issues through user tests to prioritize features

2019-2021 | Head of UX | Dignity Health

Overview

During this time, the designers on my team were outnumbered by engineers 20-to-1 and key product priorities were often started without a design-minded team member and brought in after features were scoped. One such example was with our Single Sign-On product, which was scoped for eight months before a designer was introduced.

UX team is introduced after months of feature grooming & development

This is an example of the complex documentation that was handed off to the UX team each time a feature needed to be designed. There are many problems with this process, one of which is that it took a long time to understand the requirements of a feature, which were decided on without a designer.

Earning UX a seat at the table meant I had to bring users to the forefront

In order to bring designers into the product process, I decided to bring product team members into the design product first. I took a few of our unmoderated, think aloud user tests began our full-day “UX session” by showing the product team how users struggled with the product. I used service blueprinting to breakdown the step-by-step user journey and then look at the systemic “back-stage” issues that caused the user inconvenience or kept the product from performing to par.

This was the actual white board all of the designers, product managers, and engineers worked on to identify the problems with the product. We all gathered at our Phoenix office and worked together over 6 hours.

Keeping the momentum after the day long session, I quickly digitized our artifacts and created next steps

This was the digitized version of the service blue print our team worked on together in Phoenix. I used this as a starting point to create product documentation that identified and priorities features for development.

This was the priority matrix we used to priorities identified features during the UX session I facilitated. The digitized version is shown to the right.

Translating prioritized features to product docs

I also put the information from the visual artifacts into a list of features that product managers, engineers and designers can use in their roadmap. This was especially helpful in getting user stories written for their Kanban board.

This is the list of features that was translated from the service blueprint artifact.

Final product: a redesigned sign in process

While the service blueprinting session was the inaugural step that earned a seat at the table for designers, our designers worked hand-in-hand over several months to design our flagship app that users could access once they were able to complete Single Sign-On.