Empathize: What is the problem?

When I first began working at ECI, one of my first product-design assignments was an upgrade for the very popular manufacturing product, JobBOSS². Job-shop customers using the platform needed a way to see:

• Real-time job statuses
• Visual-cue indicators for at-a-glance insights
• Centralized job-project details

Define: Deeply understanding the problem.

Our customer feedback and product research showed us that our customers also wanted less repetitive status checks that required them to drill deeply into individual records. They wanted to save time & costs, and reduce errors through efficient data availability and visualization.

Ideate: How can we solve the problem?

Product, engineering and our design team synthesized customer feedback in multiple meetings over the course of a few weeks, discussing potential solutions to this issue. In Figma, I created a few different scenarios of how we could solve this issue. I made sure to include our product and engineering teams, working closely with them to make sure we were committing to a desirable as well as a viable solution.

Prototype: Show an MVP that can solve the problem.

To do this, I designed & prototyped a solution to show the product team what was possible and to give the engineering team a reference to follow when building the new feature.

Test: Do real users feel like this would solve the problem?

We did receive positive feedback & usage statistics from user feedback in Pendo after launching the new feature.

All of this work elevated the user experience in the product, allowing customers to stay on top of their production needs. You can read more about the upgrade here.

You can also read more about why well-designed UX matters in job shop software here.

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