Workfront: New Experience

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.