Application Lifecycle Management reporting helps Nike Tech leaders assess the current state of the products and platforms that enable key business areas.
The Application Lifecycle Management team was creating reports around simplification and modernization using the Essential platform. These reports had been informed by potential users, but had not been validated for both content and usability.
Role
My role was to develop and conduct user interview sessions, gather insights on the current state reporting platform, and provide UX/UI design recommendations for current & future states.
Team
1 ALM Product Owner
1 ALM Technical Lead
2 Engineers
2 UX Designers
Design Tools
Miro, Figma, Zoom (for remote interviews)
Goals
Gain insights from users of the reports on their understanding of terms and UI patterns within the current ALM tool.
Identify areas of the tool that require additional research and user validation.
Provide current and future state UX and UI design recommendations, based on the insights from users.
Five usability interviews were conducted during a single sprint cycle. Each session lasted approximately 45 minutes, and was broken into 2 sections. The first section was designed to gather general insights about Application Lifecycle Management and the concepts around both Simplification and Modernization.
User Insights
The general criteria for both simplification & modernization of platforms was agreed upon by our users.
Tech leaders need to know two things about either simplification or modernization of a platform:
Is there a need for either simplification or modernization?
How critical is the need within the capability compared to others?
Simplification & Modernization metrics are used as a communication tool by tech leaders in order to request budget, justify divestment, or implement new product capabilities.
The second section of the interviews focused on showing participants the current Simplification & Modernization Summary report UI (below), asking them how they would interpret what they see and how they would interact with the report.
Current State Insights
The Essential themed appearance and color scheme felt very different from other internal Nike apps.
There was confusion around what would appear, or be removed, when selecting either Modernization Areas or Simplification Opportunities from the Presentation Options.
The simplification & modernization bars that are revealed when selecting the corresponding Presentation Option checkboxes confused users. Most users could not interpret what the visual of the bar meant and how to read it.
Current State Recommendations
Aligning colors and design elements with Nike brand creates continuity from Essential into other Nike applications for users.
Providing Context around how the Presentation Options section works (in the Note section) sets the expectation for users, and should reduce confusion.
Users can get more info on definition/criteria for “Modernization Areas” and “Simplification Opportunities” by hovering over info icon.
Adding Modernization Areas and Simplification Opportunities to the Summary section brings focus to the entire report.
Future state designs were created in Figma to demonstrate how adoption of the Nike Design System and new UX patterns could get the ALM team to their north star vision for an easily accessible and intuitive reporting platform.
Future State Recommendations
The tab structure allows users to quickly chunk the information into subsets where data can be more easily parsed.
Reducing the amount of space used for filters allows for more space to be dedicated to content.
Summary tiles show a quick view of content below, while also indicating where there may be issues at-a-glance.
Each of the 3 platform sections also have a summary section, so users can see how the overall summary is constructed.
Simplification and modernization tagging system allows users to evaluate both need and urgency at-a-glance while allowing us to simplify the controls by removing the Presentation Options section. Filtering by Simplification or Modernization status will remove L1 capabilities that do not fit the status selected from each filter.
Users can expand L1 capabilities cards to reveal L2 info and make quick comparisons across both a single, or multiple L1 sections.
Conclusion
The Application Lifecycle Management team has implemented the current state recommendations to align the experience with other Nike internal tools, providing a more seamless user experience. This team is also currently using the insights uncovered from our user interviews to continue to build towards the future state designs provided.