SkillSuite Flows Feature

USER EXPERIENCE AND VISUAL INTERFACE DESIGN

Experience and interface design for Flows feature in SkillSuite software.

We designed a new flows feature to provide a place to set up actions related to a course.

COMPANY OVERVIEW
SkillSuite is a training tool for business employees. SkillSuite helps businesses minimize the headache for training and employees and makes it easy for business leaders to share training materials and track employee progress.

THE TEAM
1 UX Designer, 6 Developers, 1 Product Owner

How did we have impact?

THE ROLE WE PLAYED IN THIS PROJECT

Developing product strategy and simple user research with stakeholders

Creating, developing, and presenting new user experience ideas

Designing interface, creating prototype, and doing usability testing

Worked closely with developers to ensure high quality work

What was the problem?

WE ARE PROBLEM SOLVERS

Stakeholders noticed confusion on how to connect different actions related to courses.

SkillSuite saw a need to for creating complex flows and actions related to courses through creating a flows feature.

It wasn’t clear how to require one course to be completed before another.

Lacked a way to set up notifications related to courses.

It was hard to combine multiple actions together.

Proposed solutions to the problem

PRODUCT STRATEGY

After having previously tried a concept called Tracks, we concluded a new Flows feature would help with the need for creating multiple actions or complex flows related to courses.

Tracks

Our first rendition, but it wasn’t clear how it related to assigning courses.

Flows

The concept was more complex, but with more options on combining different actions related to a course or courses.

ANY CHALLENGES TO WORK AROUND?

Not every situation allows for the ideal experience design process for a development team. I experienced the following challenges while working on this project:

Lack of User Research

A lack of user research before beginning to design the user experience can lead to some poor choices being made based on thoughts or opinions with proof of what a user actually needs.

Stakeholder Pushback

Oftentimes those who are emotionally invested in the project are so focused on what they think is important that they automatically assume they know what the user wants. When those wants don’t match up, it can result in wasted time and money.

Rushed Timelines

Rushing the design process can result in lower quality design and development because of not allowing the necessary time to think through any potential problems or properly test ideas.

Lack of Roadmapping

Skipping the original standard process of long-term roadmapping for a product can often result in wasted time and money because of lack of planning for the long term goals of a product.

Experience Design

WIREFRAMED SOLUTIONS

First, we mapped out the experience of where flows would be located in the software and what options would be needed and useful for users.

Next, we mapped out the details and settings for actions, timing, and conditional logic.

Next, we mapped out templates for the most common flows that would be used by users.

SkillSuite - Wireframes - Groups, Permissions 2

Proposed solutions to the problem

PRODUCT STRATEGY

Zach, CEO, creates flows within the new SkillSuite flows feature and can set up the most common actions for course trainings for his employees.

Kristi, the HR Manager, sets up flows for each training course for new employees, setting up the correct order of completion along with notifications for managers.