After I set the design operations structure at News the team had clear visibility on what the issues with the software were and the whole team was aligned on what to fix, how and when to fix it.
I designed a process that aimed to break knowledge and collaboration silos with. The process focus was to make a single source accessible for different stakeholders.
I joined news a couple of days after the soft-launch of the app, and with three months before the actual hard-release announcement, I had no choice but to go full steam ramping up the app and domain knowledge. So I spent the first couple of days there understanding the structure and feature set of the app. An AS-IS story map is a good tool to do this.
The next stop was performing a **PURE Heuristic Evaluation** of the app. This would allow me to get a balanced view of the key opportunities the software had; some of which were later validated through usability testing.
A PURE Dashboard that highlight the app's showstoppers in red, as agreed by three design experts.
A paper usability testing with actual users. The participant is completing tasks on the script, by highlighting the wireframe.
Documentation was scattered, with multiple unorganised versions of the same file available, which created confusion between designers and developers as there was no single source of truth.
Using Abstract and Sketch we created our Design System (Experience Design General Architecture Repository, or E.D.G.A.R. for short) a file architecture that maximised component reusability and consistency and reduced the number of files required.
E.D.G.A.R turned this:
88 total files out of which
some have 21 versioned copies
which have been versioned 85 times
Some files contain up to 40 artboards
Into this: