Thunderbird UI design system
Manager dashboard
Product Designer and Developer
Visual design, front-end development, user research
2021-2022
Challenge
Level-one managers at Sandia have a multitude of daily tasks to complete along with long-term planning and other larger efforts. Completing these tasks can be a burden due to the multiple touch points required.
Hypothesis
By providing informative and actionable “widget” on the home page of Sandia’s intranet, managers would be able to easily view their staff details and take action and “clear the decks” of common tasks. This would reduce the burden on level-one managers
Process
1. Understand Pain Points
Conducted a series of interviews with level-one managers to identify the difficult aspects of their jobs and what tasks are most time-consuming.
2. Whiteboard and Understand Limitations
Whiteboarded how we could alleviate the manager burden through a tool. We met consistently with developers to understand the data we could get and what interactions were possible.
3. Solicit Feedback
Reached back out to managers to get feedback on wireframes and make sure we were headed in the right direction.
4. Prototype
Once our wireframes were to a point where we felt confident about the basic design, we created high-fidelity interactive prototypes that demonstrated interactivity.
5. Conduct Usability Studies
Usability studies were conducted to test the effectiveness of our design and real-world manager tasks were simulated using these prototypes.
6. Develop and Deploy
The manager widget was developed within our testing environment. Once all of the data connections were made, and the widget fully tested, it was deployed to production.
7. Socialize and Iterate
We ensured that managers were made aware of this new functionality and we added new features within our agile workflow as we obtained user feedback.
Deliverables
The “My People” widget team included talented UX researchers, designers and developers. While I was involved in all facets of the process, my primary involvement was in the following activities.
Wireframe potential solutions
I worked primarily in Balsamiq to wireframe various layouts of the widget. Our wireframes were refined as we iterated and narrowed down the design.
Prototyping and user testing
Once the wireframes were complete and we had socialized them with potential users, we started high-fidelity prototypes.
A set of usability tests were then conducted for managers to complete a set of common tasks within our prototypes. This was an indication of the success of our design. Virtual “hallway” tests were also conducted for immediate feedback on minor design edits.
Front-end development
I assisted the development team with the Angular front-end development work, focusing primarily on the styling of the widget within the context of Sandia’s intranet home page, “Inside.”
Outcome
The “My People” manager widget was met with praise from managers and it provided a noticeable time savings. Within 3 months of being used by management, we determined the following data through a ROI study:
