Intelligent Capture
This project is to resolve a complaint from a large customer.
The customer complains that it takes too long to enable live capture; once explained that our software actually goes through all wireless controllers in order to enable live capture for just one client device, the customer says, why can't you just enable it via one wireless controller, for example, let me select one?
Working on such a complex, brownfield project, I resisted the temptation of jumping in and creating a design literally translating what's written in the bug system (which was interpreted as "what the customer wants".)
Instead, the team (including a product manager, an architect, a front-end engineer and a technical marketing engineer) focused on understanding the root cause and the bigger picture. We did several workshops and chatted in Team
- To understand the root cause of the complaint;
- To understand the current features and their implementation, including how different functionalities of intelligent capture are put together, and the workflow of using each of them when the customer does troubleshooting;
- To underscore high-risk hypotheses, which we used to design the prototypes to make sure we "solve one problem without creating another".
Then, I developed hypotheses based on the discussions and created mockups which the product manager used to go back to the customers to ask further questions and validate those hypotheses. We did 2 rounds of "asking questions using mockups", and the insights give the team confidence with the new design and help the engineers to architect a solution quickly.
I also did a couple of design exercises using this opportunity that delve further beyond the assignment:
- Does it make more sense for the user to use the existing, generic presentation for "Client 360" instead of an ad-hoc iCap data visualization?
- What would it look like if we use a different design architecture for our current product, for example, one that emphasizes on the generalization of similar functions across different contextual applications?
