Strategy Builder

The Strategy Builder project was initiated to address a growing demand for a popular Strategy Class that had outpaced the capacity of its instructor. Tasked with designing, developing, and deploying an online equivalent within 6 months, our consulting team focused on creating an interactive learning experience that retained the core instructional value of the in-person course through iterative UX Research and Design. I then assisted the development team in delivery of our designs as acting product owner to deliver a fully working website to our client on time and on budget.

Project Background

My consulting team was approached to work on this project because a Senior Principal Engineer had no more bandwidth to meet increased demand for a Strategy Class that he taught so he requested our help to design, build and deploy a new product that would deliver a similar online experience to his class. Our objective was to understand the education needs and key user interactions to create matching outcomes with different approaches to learning the same strategy process.

I acted as the Lead UX Researcher and PM on this project, a supporting designer in Axure, and eventual Product Owner during the development process. I was partnered with one other senior designer for the first 3 months of the project and I transitioned in the development team to build and deliver our prototypes within another three months for a total timeline of 6 months. A critical piece of our success was the ability of the consultancy team to flex our time and priorities while maintaining seamless communication with the client team through my continued presence with both teams.

Understanding the Current State

The first step of research I directed was to understand two key things: the current class content and who was the audience of this class and product. To do this, I decided on using multiple user research techniques. 

First, I conducted expert interviews with our client and his teaching partner to dig into how this class came to be, what the expected outcomes were for students, and current problem areas that are known through student evaluations. This research showed that the class depended heavily on text-dense powerpoint slides (image below) and on the spoken content of both instructors. Not all of the content that our new site would need was available, so I instructed the instructors to start documentation of final content within the first month of work to meet deadlines as early as possible.

Next, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 8 past class participants to understand the student perspective on what they would need to receive from an online tool that would create an equivalent experience in their mind. These sessions showed that the students appreciated the guided process of the classes and wanted a similar format of content and work being delivered at a “just-in-time” format. This insight heavily influenced the prototype design to be form based from the start that followed the task flow of instruct, build, reflect, and evaluate for each section of strategy creation. 

Prototype Driven Design & Research

Axure was the prototyping tool of choice for the project. This was due to the interactivity available in the prototyping tool and realistic testing experience of storing variables, like form entry data, to be used at a later page in the prototype. While this experience is more evolved now in tools like Figma, at the time Axure was the only tool to have a fully mature process for this.

To make the most of these capabilities, the UX team jumped into using mid fidelity right away. This choice also was helped by much of the process being defined through initial user interviews and the class itself, so I was able to continually update components after only a few interviews to help us meet our deadlines.

We were able to design very realistic-feeling prototypes that went from using lorem-ipsum and general placeholders in the first 6 weeks to creating a high-fidelity main task flow that responded to user input during the last 6 weeks. This led to my usability testing sessions focusing on the type of educational content needs and detailed interaction experiences that helped meet our 3 month design timeline with ease.

User Interview Insight: Peer Review!

One key insight during testing revealed that the client team had decided to originally remove a key piece of the interaction that users craved to make an equivalent experience: peer review. The original instructor led classes paired students together to discuss their work with each other, reflect, and make changes as needed to their strategies.

Originally, the team decided that peer reviews were not a critical component to include because they didn’t directly teach students using the new product. However, my continuous user research with past class participants highlighted that this decision vastly changed the experience and would not create equivalent outcomes in user’s minds. 

So, we were able to adapt quickly and add a new section to our form flow: the Pause and Chat. This section was included as a way to copy an email template with simple instructions for our website students to take a break and go offline for feedback. This was immediately met with positive feedback in testing and was implemented in the first round of development as a critical piece of the user flow. 

Development

My role during the development of Strategy Builder was to act as the Product owner for the two developers who built the site within 3 months. I was responsible for writing user stories in conjunction with the dev team, representing the client needs and making final design approvals or changes as the site was created. My deep knowledge behind the original ask, the research, and the design decisions gave me great perspective for owning the product decisions and made for a very quick development process. The team was grateful to have an involved developer to help them make decisions on the implementation and to help clarify interactions such as the saving features, hover colors, and many more small details that were not always covered in the high fidelity prototype.

Impact

Strategy Builder has been released and adopted by multiple Business Units across the enterprise and is now being integrated into the HR office as the organizations are reorganized. There are planned upgrades to the system including exploring the possibility of using AI to analyze cross-enterprise strategies and connect groups using the centralized repository of strategy for the company.

My work on understanding the client ask, user needs, creating & testing design iterations, and development transition helped to create a new web product from scratch in 6 months with an on time, on budget delivery that fully satisfied all requirements.