Deloitte
Deloitte Innovation Lab
- Role
- UX Design Director / Creative Director
- Dates
- 2014 – 2019
Overview
Deloitte's Platform iLab is the central hub within global Deloitte for enterprise software development. Our products deliver Deloitte's intellectual property for solving its clients' cross-industry issues into tools for both accelerating service engagements and empowering clients with the knowledge and expertise we've historically delivered only through services. I was the Design Director for the core UX & Product Design team in the lab. Our team's skill and expertise ranged from UX research, ideation, and UX & visual design — solving complex problems through software across a multitude of industries, spanning supply chain, business strategy, revenue management, health care, human capital and more. In addition to building products, we also provided design services to the broader organizational asset teams, educating and enabling others in building and delivering meaningful solutions to market.
- Design Leadership
- Mentorship
- Ideation
- UX Research
- User Flows & Wireframes
- Visual Design
Leading
Defining a Human-Centered Design Framework
Leveraging the fundamentals of Human-Centered Frameworks, we established our fundamental principles for good design, as well as a solid process and approach to building meaningful experiences for our tools.
Toolkits
Building Design Tool Kits
UX Research Tool Kit
Defining the insights and activities for defining, understanding and empathizing with your intended users.
Ideation Tool Kit
Building awareness and understanding of the activities and importance of ideation, and the process behind it.
Usability Testing & Feedback
Explaining various qualitative and quantitative methods and activities for gathering feedback on the user's experience.
Designing
Inveritas
Supply Chain Analytics
Problem
Not having a clear view of inventory levels and trends leads to stockouts, overages in facilities, unnecessary transit costs and more — all of which add cost and lose gains, keeping gross revenue from being optimized.
Objective
Leverage Deloitte Services' IP for supply chain inventory solutions: identify the company types trying to solve this problem, understand what story the data needs to tell them and what actions they need to take, then package the repeatable elements into the Inveritas product coupled with a customizable service package.
Understand Our Users
Through industry and best-practice research, user interviews and user sessions, we identified our core personas and documented the current state of their process, tasks, touchpoints and pain points. As a team, we then identified the most impactful insights for managing their inventory portfolio — trends, largest areas of opportunity, and necessary actions.
Constraints
The biggest pain point we couldn't solve for in the tool — which also greatly affected its success — was the data ingestion process. For the tool to provide accurate insights, the data going in had to be accurate, which required a lot of time and effort to cleanse messy data.
Exploring What Could Be
To simplify the complicated, we first needed to map out the complicated process, identify the patterns, and simplify from there — bridging the gap between a highly complex Deloitte best practice for analyzing inventory levels and the needs and actions of our client end users. We partly solved for this by identifying key data points that, when delivered upfront, could provide high-level insights while the full data collection and cleanse continued.
As the flows took shape and the patterns became clearer, the visual story started to take shape — understanding your inventory lens over time, by location, product and stock type. In collaboration with the team, I iterated and evolved the story as more insights came in.
Usability Test
Prototype testing wireframes is a great way to understand if we're concepting something comprehensible by our users. We ran testing with both the consultant and client user to evaluate how intuitive the navigation, interactions and visual story were.
Interesting insight: during research, consultants expressed a desire to drill down and manipulate charts and visualizations, while client users expressed wanting lists targeting items to focus on. During usability testing, we found both types of users interacted with the tool very similarly — leveraging both the lists and visuals to complete tasks.
Delivering an MVP
Through several rounds of iteration, and factoring in development constraints, we landed on an MVP that has since been delivered to several Fortune 500 clients successfully.
Polaris
Revenue Management Platform
Problem
Not having a consolidated view of your revenue portfolio — what products are performing well or not, what tactics are working, and how to plan for the year, half year or quarter.
Objective
Leverage Deloitte Services' IP for revenue management solutions to model a system for monitoring global revenue portfolios — taking the manual process that existed in complicated spreadsheets and simplifying it into one place.
Understand Our Users
Through industry and best-practice research, user interviews and user sessions, we identified our core personas and documented the current state of their process, tasks, touchpoints and pain points. As a team, we then brainstormed how to create the most horrible experience possible with what we knew.
I was walking into an existing concept with a lot of baggage and adversity on the team, which also meant plenty of pre-existing perspectives on what needed to be built. To facilitate a successful — and positive — brainstorm, I used the despicable method: “make this a bad experience.” The result was a highly collaborative session (with laughter) that drove us to the most impactful items to focus on for the future state.
Exploring What Could Be
To simplify the complicated, we again needed to map out the complicated process, identify the patterns, and simplify from there — bridging the gap between a highly complex Deloitte best practice for analyzing revenue portfolios and the needs and actions of our client end users.
Usability Test
Prototype testing wireframes early is how we understand if we're concepting something intuitive for our users. We tested with internal pricing and revenue leaders across the firm to evaluate how intuitive they found the navigation, interactions and visual story.
Delivering an MVP
After a few quick rounds of iteration — and factoring in development constraints, with only two sprints to build the full KPI dashboard — we landed on an MVP that has since been delivered to several Fortune 500 clients, along with a global-scale release.