The battle of parity vs parity plus.
How do we manage the expecations and requirements of the business and the user?
TLDR
A global compliance and safety company has a massive problem - they have more articles, data, and information than its current library and data center can support. The subject matter experts, SMEs, are in need of a new way to organize the data they collect.
This company is reluctant due to costs but is willing to see what the UX team can provide.
This company is reluctant due to costs but is willing to see what the UX team can provide.
The business
This team is reluctant. They know it needs to happen but are worried about the cost and time.
The SMEs
Of course they are overjoyed but because the system has been broken for so long they each have developed their own ways of collecting data and want the UX team to design the new management website to fit the way they are currently working.
The UXer
We are given the freedom to design whatever we want, including building a brand new design system but what we build now most likely won't be touched for another 20 years.
Now that we have the facts...
This is the part where I tell you that in order to not overload you we will skip through the creation of the design system, and we will focus on only one screen because this is a story of one battle, not the creation of an entire website.
Start with the parity plus story.
My lead designer and I took all the notes, videos, and demos from the SMEs and build a story board of the happiest path for them to successffuly do their jobs each day.
Each story card contains all actions and items in that screen.
The story cards acted as a resource for the developers when we started getting work estimations.
Build parity plus
Since we build an expansive design system specific to the needs of the data management website, I was able to read the story card and plug in all the molecules/components built.
Now that the hard part is out of the way... build parity
Parity's job was all to convince the business why it was critical to take such a large leap in a new direction.
We wanted to show the version of just simple UI clean up with a little improvement here or there.
We wanted to show the version of just simple UI clean up with a little improvement here or there.
Parity
The only minor change to parity was adding our new record tray just in case parity is what we had to do.
Parity vs Parity Plus
Parity plus was the winner, however we were tasked with finding ways to cut 1/4 of the story points off the devlopers estimations.
Some of the ways we could do that without compromising the design were...
Some of the ways we could do that without compromising the design were...
Instead of "good morning" or "good afternoon" the greeting was just welcome and cutting the profile picture.
Each task in the task cards at the top are not clickable. A user needs to go to "view all" to take action.