Company
2017-Present
2017
My role
Deliverables
- New navigation
- Usability testing
- Research
Overview
Workfront’s existing navigation was not flexible enough to serve its users and their needs. It was cumbersome going and out of areas in the product, often confusing and impossible to find what they’re looking for. This project has spanned the course of nearly 2 years to develop and test into.
Sketching sessions
The VP of UX and I had several brainstorming sessions where we talked about the vision of the new Workfront experience: speed and clarity. Creating a flexible and customizable navigation were two of the biggest pieces of feedback we heard from users, so we set out on defining what that meant.





Wireframe testing
After settling on a few directions, I went ahead and wireframed a few ideas to pass around. From there, the UX researcher on our team and I settled on 3 of the solutions we received the best feedback on and launched a Usability Hub test using a Pendo guide in our app to test and receive feedback from real Workront users.






Results
We had roughly 54 participants for each of the 3 tests we built. As you can see, the results varied from step to step, but it gave us a few directions to go forward with.



Information Architecture
As we were testing out different ideas, I was also working through the tangled mess that was our information architecture. With a product this old, understanding the layers and the amount of ways a user could perform a single task was incredibly difficult, but our ultimate goal was too create a system that could be flexible enough for users to jump from one area of the app to the next seamlessly.





Landing on a solution
From the testing and research I finally landed on a tabbed idea. User’s are frequently opening and closing tasks, projects and documents within Workfront, so to have a way for them to do it quickly and to customize what they see at any given time was important. I started to wireframe more of the nuances from this point.






Creating high-fidelity mocks
As we inched closer to finding a solution, our next step was to create a MVP prototype to have our engineers to begin building so we could get real user feedback in their production environments. So I designed and what the new system would be like.

Beta
Once we had our MVP solution we launched an Alpha and Beta program with about 100-200 of our current users. We brought them into the solution and had them provide feedback regularly and spoke with them often. We learned a lot over the course of several months and learned about a lot of the issues that could and would arise from having a tabbed system–one being the amount of tabs user’s would have open at a time, so we began to draw some conclusions about where to go next.

Next steps...
We are still in the learning phases of our Beta phase, but we have begun to shift to a new concept, Workspaces and pinning pages. I am currently working on this solution by pairing with one of my engineers and UX researchers to test and validate a new solution, we hope to iterate into this new solution by our general availability early next year.