Potential and existing enterprise clients, including KPMG, L’Oreal, NYTimes, Walgreens, and Yahoo!, had been requesting org structures functionality for a while. Org structures partition data by team or branch, so data is not amalgamated. The top of the branch has an unobstructed view down, while the bottom can only see data at their level but cannot see data up the branch. As a result, users within branch nodes or org units wouldn’t waste time sifting through the entire organization’s files to find their work and would get a private view of their data.
Who was the problem affecting?
Freelancer recruiters, managers, and payers at KPMG, L’Oreal, NYTimes, Walgreens, and Yahoo! wanted their data private from other groups within their organizations.
What steps did I take to solve it?
Our team’s director of product tasked the product manager, tech lead, and me to start thinking about workflows and a UI. Though the product team had conducted research a year prior, we never saw any documentation of the findings. So I requested to conduct discovery research to strategize and prioritize what to build and when. We got six months to conduct research and report our findings.
Org. structures research deck
I met with sales and support team individuals to gather what they understood about the problem space and help us identify client contacts we would want to learn from. Next, I recorded the interviews, transcribed them, and led an affinity mapping session with my scrum team to synthesize findings and identify commonalities. Next, my product manager and I prepared a report to facilitate building a question set for all five clients. I also fired up Sketch to lay out initial ideas from our formulated hypotheses. Finally, we iterated on UI workflows to conduct cognitive walkthroughs to gather client feedback and buy-in.
Research document with links to transcripts and interview recordings
I scheduled sessions and led participating clients through in-depth interviews and cognitive walkthroughs of workflows, UI components, and patterns introduced. Finally, we presented concept validation findings and research discovery to the product and executive teams and got the go-ahead to proceed with the UX strategy and approach.
The product manager and I analyzed the information from in-depth interviews and devised our approach. Some clients, like Yahoo! and L’Oreal, requested this feature for financial purposes: to pay freelancers and monitor and report on budgets.
After gathering takeaways from the initial cognitive walkthroughs, I iterated on a more robust high-fidelity prototype. The product manager and I usability tested several tasks with the prototype in person with the NYTimes and remotely with Walgreens and L’Oreal. Our prototype passed the testing well. Next, we iterated on moving an org unit a level up because of the data visibility issues it brought up.
Workflow diagram
Prototype used for concept validation and usability testing
Final Solution
We developed an object-based UI that allowed the movement of org units like Legos—rectangles that were drag-and-dropped across the screen. Highlight areas indicated where the unit could be inserted right before dropping it. The org structure kept user information private as it went down their branch, preventing other departments from having a view into it.
Impact
After iterating on design and development, the team deployed org structures MVP. The participating R&D clients above were pleased with the feature and wanted us to build it further. As a result, the NYTimes signed up as a client, better positioning WorkMarket to be acquired by ADP.
