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 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 follows business policies. When applications are built to automate and digitally transform a business, they must also implement their 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 to generate a roadmap of testable hypotheses.
I partnered to build a fully prototyped proof of concept, and user tested this prototype in our mobile Design Lab at the company conference.
Participants explored a new, empty decision table (shown below) and attempted to create business logic using this directly editable experience.
Users could freely type to either select from known values or propose new ones (denoted with a dotted line) as they author the logic they want.
An in-context menu allowed for contextual actions, including complex collaboration requirements such as locking values down before sending to to others for review.
When authoring or testing decisions, user assistance would dynamically appear along a "run line" to highlight where the user might need to update their logic for execution to work. This could be anticipated formatting that wouldn't validate, identified gaps in the logic, or overlaps in the logic.
Decision logic is often reusable and nested. We explored having a portal where users can organize and consume reusable decision services.
The navigation, search, and filters dynamically update the list for a smooth experience.
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.