Visier Inc.

UX / UI Internship
Fall – Sping 2019

I interned at Visier Inc. for 8 months in 2017 as a UX Designer. My project of focus was the unification of disparate information architecture systems with extensive application of modular design practices.

Responsibilities
Information Architecture, UX Design, Interface Design

Tools
Sketches, Illustrator, Sketch

Skills
User Journeys, Agile Development, Developer Handoff

Context

Visier Inc. is a workforce solutions company. They make software that provides insights on talent acquisitions and onboarding processes, as well as tools for analysing and planning employee movement in the organization to help with the appropriate acquisition, retention, and promotion of the workforce.

NOTE: In compliance with my non-disclosure agreement with Visier, the screens highlighted in this case study have been recreated as wireframes.

When I started my term at Visier, two of the flagship products, Workforce Planning (WFP) and Workforce Analytics (WFA) displayed plans and analyses, respectively, as a list. These lists, however, were not consistent in their information architecture: plans were listed in multiple buckets with multiple points of metadata, whereas analyses were listed as simplified links. Additionally, WFP was being ported to the platform upon which WFA was based.

Approach

In an effort to bring a modular UX design approach to the organization, I worked to design a consistent information architecture for showing items as a list. The first step towards achieving this was to extract out points of metadata (fig. 4) and actions common to list items in each product. I subsequently took measures to ensure that this component was reusable in its implementation, which included prototyping, as well as making sure that the interface was flexible enough to respond to novel contexts and potential visual redesigns.

In WFP, users can share plans with other users, as well as assign them to users as tasks. To manage the multiple scenarios (eg. plans the user has assigned, plans assigned to the user, plans the user has shared with another, and so on), the information architecture was split up into multiple buckets, one per such a case. Although search worked across all the buckets, this made navigation, scanning, and performing batch actions unintuitive.

In collaboration with the stakeholders, I made the decision introduce a more robust notion of authorship. It was agreed that the bucketing system needed to be retained. But with the introduction of authorship it could be tempered. For instance, “My Plans” and “Plans shared with me” could be listed under “Plans” and distinguished by supplementarily surfacing the author of the plan.

Rather than stress testing the completed solution using a complex workflow, I started with said complex workflow (fig. 5) and circumambulated it to ensure that the design serves its purpose.

The reorganization of the information architecture, the introduction of authorship, and a new complex workflow culminated in the completion of the final spec (fig. 6). The project imparted knowledge on designing microinteractions under an overarching narrative and a modular approach to UX design that results in reusable components that are effective, yet efficient.