Project Brief
Going into this project, the team and I were aware of some existing issues with our internal alerting and monitoring application called “Flight Ops.” Namely, the application UI is outdated regarding industry best practices and professional presentation. Also, we had data from our Research team, which showed that users had problems with the alerting, letting us know that they had difficulty with how actionable the alerts were and confusing naming conventions. At the time (mid-2020), we also had concept plans for a new Alerting service that would serve a future-concept application workflow, free of existing application constraints but tailored to individual user experiences. This project aimed to conceptualize a platform where users could manage Notifications and Alerts and provide actionable interactions to launch their next steps.
Core Stakeholders
● Users
○ Account Managers
○ Campaign Managers
● IX Designers (Prototyping)
● ICON (Front-end Dev Engineer team)
● Product Management
● Researchers (Testing)
● Design Leadership
Goals
● Brainstorm application features with the team using existing User Research
● Conceptualize a unique web application within our product platform, which would allow users to manage Notifications and Alerts
● Conceptualize a Notification Tray which could “pop over”
● Design and document applications micro-interactions
A quote from an internal Vericast user.
A screenshot of the dashboard view within an internal application using alerting.
What I Did
I worked on this concept application from the mid to the third quarter of 2020. This project was an excellent opportunity to grow my Interaction Design skills. First, I gathered stakeholders from the Product Design team for a brainstorming session where we looked at existing User Research and imagined features for conceptualization. Next, we thought through possible user workflows. Afterward, I developed hi-fi wireframes and regularly checked in with my manager, Nick Mason, to iterate on the wireframes based on expectations and his intentions for showing the prototype to advocate for future work.
Groupings of ideas from a brainstorming workshop on potential requirements for a concept Notification Manager internal application.
Eventually, we settled on a table dashboard with three tabular views. From there, I worked on more detailed Visual Designs for the manager and the Notification Tray. The Notification Tray would “pop over” page content and appear in all applications in the top header bar, similar to Social Media or corporate tools like Confluence.
Visual Iterations of the core "views" within the Notification Manager concept.
Visual Iterations of a proposed "Notification Tray" component to work with the larger concept and proposed framework.
The main focus of the application was ensuring notifications were actionable, priority was evident, and users could sort large numbers of messages efficiently. The manager was tailored to specific use cases in existing applications but also offered features that were not capable within our current application framework. During the process, I also re-designed patterns for the Horizon Design System, such as our Tab Bar component.
Documentation
After wrapping up this project, I added notations to the visual designs. The goal of documenting the project in Figma was to make it easy for other designers or me in the future to pick up the project and run on the ideas conceptualized previously. The hope is that we can return to this concept as the platform is developed. The direction did change, though, later in 2022 when product leadership opted to move the internal system alerting to Tableau and not invest in developing another internal application. Therefore, the status of this project remains to be determined at the moment.
The three core views of the concept application with corresponding documentation.
Outcomes
● Provided Hi-Fi Visual Designs of the concept Notification Manager and Notification Tray
○ Included documentation of user flows and micro-interaction Visual Designs
○ The manager was able to use Visual Designs to advocate for future work concerning internal product alerting
Contextual options for row items.
Share modal.
Comparison of user hovering over row versus hovering over the kabob Icon Button.
Illustration of micro interaction of Icon Button with added dropdown menu.
Contextual options available via the concept Notification Tray component.
