Plastic SCM Client Design

Design Manager and Senior Designer 

Project Summary

This project had both organizational and design goals: to integrate a newly acquired company into Unity’s culture and to increase adoption of the product by improving the onboarding experience and the design consistency. The engineering team followed the agile development model, which resulted in minimal time for design process or research. They prioritized shipping new features over design process. My role involved bringing more rigor to the design process while also building trust with the engineers in what had been a primarily engineer-driven organization.

The goals for the design of the onboarding experience were more straightforward: enable customers to get started quickly and make informed decisions during the download and installation process. This new onboarding design needed to provide an experience consistent with the rest of the product, while still making it look and feel like part of the larger Unity family.

Process Challenges

The newly acquired company was accustomed to a very top-down approach. The company’s leadership team made product design decisions and design as a discipline was limited to influencing the appearance of the product rather than the functionality. They did not have much data about who the users were, and how people were using the existing product. Information needed to support design decisions, such as how many accounts, organizations, or repositories an average user would have, was unavailable. By contrast, the culture of Unity focusses on the user stories and empowers each employee to weigh in on decisions. These differences between the new company’s culture and Unity’s culture created challenges for evolving the design process.

Process Solution

The lead PM, lead engineer, and I started having weekly meetings to discuss the state of the project, review designs and share feedback. Listening to the opinions of the lead engineer was key to building the trust needed to make this project successful. These meetings also gave me the opportunity to show how application of a rigorous design process can improve the product.

Some things became very clear early on in these conversations. The lead engineer was used to the company’s executive leadership defining exactly what the team was to build. The engineering team had some great ideas about how to improve the design of the product, but we needed collaboration to bring those ideas to life.

We also made progress in the area of data-driven decisions. When the product shipped, it included instrumentation for all features.

Design Challenges

The existing onboarding experience was unnecessarily complicated and had too many decision points. It tried support every possible audience and every possible edge case. The experience assumed that the customer understood the difference between the different types of hosting when setting up the client. Additionally, the terminology and design patterns used in the product differed from other version control systems.

Design Solution

Before I could begin the design for the onboarding, I had to put a foundation of design process in place. No design principles had ever been defined for or applied to the product. I worked with other designers on my team to create them. I also drove alignment on these principles by pulling in the lead PMs and engineers to review them and provide input.

No user personas or user research had ever been done on the product. I started by identifying some user personas from the set our research team created. I reviewed these user personas with the key stakeholders and revised them to reflect the correct target audience.

After we had a foundation of design principles and personas in place, I performed an audit of the current onboarding for the product and identified areas where users were likely to become confused or lost and where users had to make decisions without all of the relevant information. From there I created storyboards in LucidCarts to review with the key stakeholders.

I created a set of four different onboarding prototypes which I used to run “quick pulse” style interviews with 10 users. I invited the lead engineer to attend these studies which helped us build trust. She had never seen a user study, so it was eye-opening for her to see how we asked questions without leading the users. After delivering a report on the study to the team, we used the data from these tests to pivot the design to what was shipped.

Implementing a design process and using that process for the design was key to improving trust with the engineers. The engineering team was involved and heard during every step of the process. Alignment became easier as the project progressed.

Outcomes

This project had two sets of goals: organizational and design. Its successful completion represented a significant first step in bringing a more product-centric and design-centric way of thinking to the team, which also supported the organizational goal of integrating the acquired company into the existing culture. By the end of this project, the engineering team were beginning to apply the design principles to their thinking about the project. There is still room for improvement. We continue to build on this first step, focusing next on improving how we design in an agile environment.

For this project, the changes in process were as important and difficult as solving the design challenges. Building trust with the engineering team was the key component to the project’s success. But process changes take time. Taking a measured approach where feedback was solicited in a regular cadence ensured that the new engineering team felt included, and that everyone involved felt ownership of the problem space. As a result, everyone on the team was proud of what we shipped.