Harvest

Enterprise SaaS Web Application

When I joined the Harvest team, we had just reached minimum viable product. The pieces were all there and things were working, but the experience left a lot to be desired. My role on the project covered everything from user research to interaction design to prototyping to implementation of UI features.

Are we building the right features?

While our product team worked hard on the business side of things, I was there to help align the business with what users were telling us they needed or were struggling with. We didn't have buy-in from stakeholders to spend time conducting traditional user research. To help create a UX strategy that would work with our business goals, I would research internally, sit on customer calls, and conduct guerrilla research.

Wireframe, Prototype

As the only experience designer on a team full of engineers, I was lock-step with the same Agile processes, the same two-week sprints, as everyone else. This means incremental changes, one feature at a time. Quick prototyping in code was critical if we determined a new feature couldn't use a pattern already within the application, not to mention that no design languages had been established or design principles written.

keeping the big UX picture (when there isn't one!)

This was the real challenge! It was my almost daily ritual around the cadence of our software development cycle to document functionality and flows, and write rationales around them from a user perspecitve. Not just for new features, I needed to understand what already existed so we could both improve what we had and maintain consistency.

The result

It was a slow process, but with positive results. We received unsolicited praise on the increased ease of use from our current customers, and our customer service load decreased as we both empowered users with features they actually needed to do their tasks, and made the UI more intuitive through consistent design.