Challenge
Over time, isolated engineering efforts, acquisitions, and other circumstances led to multiple workflows to achieve one user objective. This is obviously not ideal for any user operating in more than one of our products, but it was also an enormous waste of our product teams' time to create and maintain these multiple solutions. It was my team's task to standardize common workflow patterns across multiple products and platforms.
Approach
My team at the time was the Standards and Special Projects team. For this initiative we wanted to look at the entire product portfolio and map all user workflows. This meant meeting with lead designers, engineers and architects for each product to understand all functionality and how tasks were achieved from a user perspective.
Once the workflows were diagramed, we could look for commonalities. We grouped the different workflows into categories such as User Management, Monitoring, Role Management, etc. With help from research, we could document the portions of the workflows through which our users found difficulty navigating and how often they preform these tasks. We also documented all terminology throughout each product's workflow.
Solution
By combining our flow charts and the data from research, we could prioritize the workflows to be fixed and identify the solution that would eliminate the most user confusion. First, we created a priority map to select which workflows would have the biggest impact if corrected and standardized.
Next, we would create the ideal workflow diagram. Then we could use that diagram as a guide to wireframe new solutions for each product. This helped greatly getting buy-in from Product and Project Managers. They could see up front how much effort would be needed to comply with our suggested standard. Designers were assigned as champions for each of the workflow categories. Each champion would meet with product leadership to discuss implementation of the proposed standard.
Once the current product teams put the proposed standards on their roadmaps, we turned our attention to future product development. We created a set of basic patterns and guides that would ensure any new flow would follow the same philosophy we had in creating this set of workflows. We met with the team responsible for product lifecycle and achieved inclusion in the official process for creating or updating products. Now all products would consult with our standards before creating or refining a workflow.
