Background
Your Contribution is the tool used by Tesco colleague’s for their performance management. An MVP of the application had been built but lacked fundamental functionality, suffered from bad usability and accessibility and was full of inconsistencies as it had been built without using design system components.
Role
As senior product designer I had several challenges I needed to address over a period of 6 months:
• Design system alignment across the product
• Evaluate existing user journeys to see how they could be improved and optimise for mobile
• Implementing feature updates
• User research - building a better picture of how the tool is used in stores
Approach
• Review key journeys and identify potential issues with usability and accessibility
• Conduct user interviews where needed for deeper understanding
• Work closely with devs to understand constraints and effort required if making changes.
• Reviewed copy to improve signposting and accessibility.
• Collaborated with other designers to understand existing themes and patterns within the design system.
What went well?
• Improved usability and accessibility across 70 journeys that spanned 10 key features.
• Improved processes and ceremonies within the team - when I joined, the team felt very disjointed I made a big effort to help the inexperienced product manager get things working smoothly.
• My collaboration with the front end dev team meant aligning to the new design system and implementing changes, went smoothly and efficiently.
What didn't go so well?
• The two product managers did not gel and had very different opinions, this meant agreeing on an approach to the project was very difficult.
• Wasted time and effort through business priorities changing - adding new features into existing badly designed journeys meant doubling work load.
• Scope creep - with disagreements on approach it was hard to set limits of how far to take improvements.
Learnings
• Don’t let issues slide that you know are going to cause problems in the future - sometimes you need to fight a little harder for the correct approach.
• If the effort of a job is an unknown entity try to pin it down as much as possible to give yourself limitations.
• If the product manager isn’t doing their job don’t be afraid to lead on something to help them get the desired results.
