my roles:  Strategy, ​User Research, Interaction Design, Visual Design

Empowering business users to own and test application logic

I designed a single experience in the cloud for business users to author, test, and publish rule applications.  
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While tackling this new space, I also helped build a design culture with executives by leading Lean workshops to drive strategy - a practice they continue in their user research today.

Who I worked with:  CTO, Director of Product Management, Strategy and Design (acting product manager and prototype developer)

BACKGROUND

Businesses have come up a notation (DMN) for defining complicated business logic that must be followed. When applications are built to automate / digitally transform a business, they must also implement this business logic. Until now, software solutions would help with part of the journey, but hadn't completed it. They either came up with a tool for business users to document thee logic or allow developers to enter and own the business logic themselves.  They use DMN, but still aren't empowering the business user to define and own the logic the applications execute. They are still metaphorically passing spec over a wall and waiting too long for updates.

DESIGN PROBLEM

Help business users define their business rules into decisions tables, a familiar notation they use today, in an accessible web application where they can discover, review, and test the logic collaboratively with other business users. No longer require developers to re-enter the logic themselves, but rather consume what the business user defines, tests, and updates for them. 

The design had to be a no-code experience natural for a business user to pick up using notations they are already familiar with.  To give you a taste of how far we wanted to push innovation, here is a screenshot of the thick-client applications offered at the time and a piece of our experience.

BEFORE

AFTER

I lead the executive team through a series of Lean UX workshops I created to generate a roadmap of testable hypotheses.

Screenshot of a fully prototyped proof of concept, user tested in our mobile Design Lab at the company conference.

How a new decision table appears when first creating one:

An in-context menu as everything was directly editable.

Display user assistance while authoring and testing decision logic.

Idea for a portal where users can organize and consume reusable decision services.

Dynamic header:

Written like an API, business users can enter values and test what the service would return.

Moreover, it's a collaboration space. Business users can author decision tables together, find each other's assets, and find services by activity.