Context
Our offices Enterprise Data Solutions team asked for support to design a suite of data products to support how the city securely shares data across city agencies.
Data Catalog
A product to help city agencies manage their data sets and legal agreements to make them easy for data analysts and lawyers across the city to search, find, and quickly identify things that might be relevant to their work.
Intellimatch
A tool that lets city agencies match data sets with each other and our offices Common Client Index. The tool currently exists as a Java applet. Our Data team is working with a vendor to evolve the backend functionality and develop this into a webapp. I am leading the design work for an improved front-end user experience and UI.
My role
Developing product vision
I ran a set of workshops with our Data team to define user goals, design principles, and short and learn term metrics for success.
Making to learn
I ran a quick sprint of discovery research with users and created a low-fidelity prototype, which I used to validate and iterate on business requirements, content strategy, UX, and information architecture. Specific outputs included:
Taxonomies to inform search and findability for data assets
Data points and Information hierarchy for different types of data sets
User flows and navigation
Prioritization of requirements using the obvious/easy/possible framework
Leveraging an underutilized pattern library
Our office has an open-source design pattern library that was built as a pet project by our front-end developer. We use it to skin our office's city-hosted website, but otherwise it was just sitting there. I facilitated a collaborative process between our product designer and our front-end developer to adopt and evolve the pattern library and put them to use for these products.
For designers. We created a Figma template for our patterns to allow faster design and prototyping.
For product teams and outside developers. Our collaboration led to a new release of the patterns, complete with new components and improved documentation to make development of new products more efficient moving forward.
Our office has taken notice of how we’ve used our patterns, and is now asking our developer to leverage the patterns in all our existing digital properties.
Making the invisible visible
I worked with our product designer to map the relationship between backend processes and user actions on the front-end. A lot of the “work” in these products is done behind the scenes, with users actually having very few actions they can take within the tool. That meant we had to make sure that we were tying each user action with the correct backend processes, and providing the right amount of information and feedback for users so they could follow what was happening without feeling overwhelmed with server-side jargon.
Guiding implementation strategy
I’ve successfully advocated for our Data team, who are used to working in more traditional enterprise development methodologies, to take an iterative approach to product development where possible. For example, on our Data Catalog product, the team is using Airtable as a basic CMS to help us get more quickly to an initial release, which the team will learn from and scale accordingly.
An eye towards governance
As part of our research, I asked potential users about how they currently manage their metadata. It’s a challenging task that no one person tends to own, and is often taken on as a special project when time permits. So while users were excited about the idea of a well-designed and easy to navigate metadata catalog, they were hesitant about their ability to keep it up to date. Our team will be working with the product owners to address this as part of a later phase of product development when we have more capacity and a coalition of agency partners willing to collaborate.