PowerDMS is a compliance and policy management platform that helps organizations create, distribute, and track policies, training, and accreditation processes. I joined as the company’s 2nd UX Designer, focused on UX improvements to our accreditation and standards manual experiences. By the end of my time there, I led a 6-person product team of platform, web, and QA devs focused on the Standards and Training components of the PowerDMS web application. I was the team’s UX designer and fractional PM, conducting user research, designing solutions, and defining our product roadmap.
Role: Senior UX Designer & Product Team Lead
Tenure: Aug 2016 – Jun 2018 (1 yrs 11 mos)
Location: Orlando, Florida
Business Impact
- Established a UI pattern library to speed development and increase consistency across our web and mobile product
- Facilitated interviews for and iterated on our generative user research program, which included 8-12 users per month
- Led research and design initiative to overhaul to how standards manual content was searched, browsed, and accessed
- Engaged with product partners and executive leadership to define strategy and roadmaps
- Leveraged my HTML email experience to standardize the design and code of transactional emails
Project Highlights
Transactional Email
My first project at PowerDMS was designing a Welcome Email experience for new users. It’s hard to imagine a modern web application where email is not required for user accounts. This is sometimes the case in the industries PowerDMS serves so previously, the application required site administrators to inform users when an account was created. In our research, we found that site admins often used a standard initial password for all users. Designing a system that automated this process simplified user management for administrators. It also led to the standardization of all transactional emails across the system. Here are 3 examples of transactional emails driven by the new template I designed.
Copy Tasks
The problem that most organizations purchase PowerDMS to solve is accreditation. It’s a complicated process, but individual organizations create assessments from a standards manual and prove that they are in compliance. An accreditation manager often assigns tasks to individuals to provide proofs of compliance for specific standards. These proofs are often requested from the same individuals, on the same cadence for every assessment cycle. My team was responsible for designing and building out the ability for tasks to be copied from one assessment to another. This was one of the top 5 most requested features from our users and saved our accreditation managers weeks worth of work for every assessment cycle.
Standards in the Sidebar
One of the most popular features of the PowerDMS application is the sidebar that allows users to search or browse for any information or records in a given site. It was my team’s responsibility to bring standards manuals and assessment content into that bar. That involved designing changes that put new content into search results. I conducted usability testing before, during, and after development completion with a group of beta testers to ensure that the project improved the overall experience without impacting our users’ ability to access crucial content.
PowerDMS Design System
As with any web application that has been iterated on for over over a decade, PowerDMS suffers from many functional inconsistencies, bespoke UI decisions, and a boat load of technical debt. One of the projects I was most proud of from my time at Mailchimp was defining the initial front-end UI patterns and helping evolve the Mailchimp Pattern Library. I pushed for the creation and adoption of a similar set of UI patterns at PowerDMS. The start of the UI pattern library I created can be seen at:
Unification of Draft, Published & Archived States
The inconsistencies in PowerDMS go far beyond UI components and front-end code. There are multiple terms for states of objects that mean the same thing. Users in PowerDMS can be deactivated, a document revision can be archived, an assessment can be closed and a course can be disabled. This results in a lot of confusion and increases the cognitive load necessary to learn the application. One of my last projects at PowerDMS was to unify the nomenclature and design a consistent visual treatment of draft, published and archived object states within the application.
