Work Synopsis
DaySmart Software designs, sells, and supports scheduling and point-of-sale software for small businesses. Annual revenue exceeds $15M.
My efforts as an intern were focused on redesigning the cloud-based SaaS solution for a full site rewrite.
The visual/interaction design and workflows created represent my first professional UX designs incorporated into a commercially shipped product.
Skills Developed
1.
Designing screens and interactions, prototyping software in Adobe XD, Sketch, InVision Studio
2.
Strong granular understanding industry-standard features and functions of appointment booking and point-0f-sale software
3.
Being able to seamlessly pivot designs based on business or dev needs
4.
Articulating the 'why' behind design decisions, and finding consensus across teams
April
May
July
Internship Phase: Starting Out (1/3)
Hired
Effort thus far: The design team was informed of plans to completely redesign and rewrite the current cloud-based appointment booking software at the end of last year. Business analysis of the current processes and functionality have been captured. A style guide has been established, and redesigns of certain functionality already underway.
Take some time to study DaySmart as an organization: its history, products, teams, and structure.
After gaining access to product offerings with test accounts, I tinker with data to gain a stronger understanding of the strengths and limits of the current state.
During this time, I shadow senior designers to better understand the discussions and decisions that influence their design decisions in Adobe XD.
During design review meetings, I gain a sense for how to explain decisions, being able to anticipate questions, and making decisions that can address a logical chain of concerns.
original desktop version
With a sense of the design decisions that will define the look, feel, and function of our appointment booking software, I am given my first assignment: Create a set of portrait and landscape views for iPad based on the full desktop rendering of the 'Employees' screen.
responsive tablet views
Internship Phase: On My Own (2/2)
With experience having a new design reviewed, adjusted, and approved by all major stakeholders, I am assigned to design a major function on my own: 'checkout', which would walk a user through completing a purchase transaction.
While the prospects of my first individual projects were a bit scary, I knew I could rely on a combination of my team's defined style rules, business analysis of current processes and functionality, and some UX research methods to define the path I should design down.
To start, I did a competitive analysis of all major appointment booking software offerings and point-of-sale solutions to get a sense for the existing models for 'checkouts'.
Findings: The 2 most high-level blocks of information you need to process a transaction,are: Items to be purchased and the payment information required to 'complete' the transaction.
Within industry leading POS-specific apps, they were generally able to go from start to finish in two major steps: Items then Payments.
For appointment booking apps, a third step in processing a sale involved tying it to an appointment or customer record.
Based on a design team heuristics review of software in our competitive analysis, we decided on rudimentary models we liked for each of these 3 screens, to then be adapted to our style guide.
With an understanding of what data points would be necessary based on our research, I mapped out what data points will need to be captured in the future state.
In Conclusion: With each day of designing based on the research conducted, style guide, and stakeholder review, the checkout process takes shape. I capture all business use cases that the developers require over the course of 6 weeks.
Over the remainder of my internship, I am assigned more screens to complete for the redesign. They include:
Appointment Book: the various calendar views where appointments are displayed at a glance
More Info: a detailed view of an appointment that allows for granular details to be updated
Schedule: the screen that allows a user to set business hours for appointments and when individual employees are available for appointments.
Internship Phase: All In (3/3)
desktop checkout screens
Really, the research efforts and review process stayed relatively consistent; we were able to continually move forward with designs. As such, I won't bog the rest of this entry down in technical detail-- I'll just show what we were able to come up with together.
appointment book
flows
appointment
book
screens
more info
screens
schedule
screens
Lessons Learned
1. Always be prepared to answer the question "Why?" for all design decisions made. The answer should point to research, data, or industry standards.
2. When working as a designer, subject matter experts can demonstrate or articulate current processes to increase understanding and prevent rework. Always work on cultivating amicable relationships to get quick, high quality answers.
3. Rather than working slow to 'perfection,' I prefer to 'fail fast' in order to get a sense for what my product stakeholders want by showing them several alternatives. Having something tangible to show always leads to less abstract, more grounded discussion of the possibilities.