The Mail Onboarding Manager (MOM) is a tool designed and built to enable IBM customers to migrate their on-premise mail into the IBM cloud. The team consisted primarily of junior designers, so as the manager for this project, my key focus was setting the direction for the team, evaluating and guiding the overall design, and managing the collaboration between engineering and design to realize the designs.
Understand
Using Design Thinking for this project, we began the process by understanding the challenge before us. We held a workshop to clearly define our hill (i.e. a clear statement of our objective) that included team members from many different roles, such as product managers, engineering, support, sales, etc. We used a variety of techniques during the workshop, including empathy maps, As Is and To Be statements, and paper prototyping to arrive at a clear hill statement: As an IT Administrator, I can use IBM provided email migration tooling, in a self-serve manner, to migrate email, contacts and calendar data on my own time-line and without assistance.
Design
Once we understood the problem we were trying to solve, we identified users at two companies who became our Sponsor Users. I guided my team in engaging these users, establishing a regular cadence of meetings with the end users and ensuring that we were getting the most out of these conversations. This allowed the team to iterate on the designs and move toward a “Playback 0,” which is a formal wireframe story about what it is that the team intends to build. While design owns this part of the process, product managers and engineering are engaged throughout and must agree to the story. I presented the Playback 0 to our executives with our Sponsor Users attending on the phone, allowing them to confirm we were on the right path.
Delivery
After Playback 0, I had my designers create detailed specifications. Since they were junior designers, I established the format to use and reviewed each design in detail. I also assigned a UX prototyper to develop a high resolution HTML prototype.
And then an opportunity presented itself. The engineering team we were working with did not have a great deal of HTML expertise. I had my prototyper partner with the engineers and deliver CSS into production. Through this partnership we achieved a final product that achieved the overall design vision more successfully than past attempts, and it has become a technique that I try to employ on other projects.
As the application was developed and code came available, I conducted Delivery Playbacks with our executive stakeholders to demonstrate the live code. During these playbacks I referenced the Playback 0 so they could see how we were delivering on the initial vision.
Once we were in beta, I and my designers visited two customer sites during deployment to further evaluate the design. These customers were different from our Sponsor Users, so we were quite pleased that the feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive, with only a few areas where we felt it necessary to iterate.
Design Thinking had proven out again.
You can see a demo of the MOM out on YouTube here
