Unqork is a codeless configuration tool for building custom enterprise applications.
Though codeless configuration has many super fans, the company lacked vision and aligned understanding of the future direction. Within a few months after I started, I kicked off a vision project to define the Northstar vision for Unqork.
Although codeless application development represents a unique opportunity to make building applications accessible to non-technical users, using Unqork still requires a highly technical background and at least a base understanding of computer science.
In an attempt to challenge this as status quo, I led the design team, along with our cross-functional partners, in a project to imagine a north star vision for Unqork where technical and non-technical users collaborate within the platform to build complex enterprise applications.
1) Changing our mindset
Many people at Unqork are quite technical and did not believe that building applications could ever be something non-technical users could do - codeless or not. Additionally, many members of the design team felt like imposters and relied on their more technical partners to define experiences for our users. How could we open their minds?
2) Building empathy through stories
By writing stories that outlined both the challenges users have along with imagining an ideal state for those users in our platform, we hoped to create a shared understanding across our organization.
3) Inspiring with design
Everything we’d done built up to this moment. We needed to show how far we could push our platform through the craft of design, to inspire our teams and ourselves.
Flipping the Script
Traditional personas put the focus on roles within an organization which came with an over emphasis on the technical expertise inherent within these roles (e.g. software engineer).
I introduced the Jobs to be Done framework to put the emphasis on what really matters - the individual jobs that make up the process of building an application. Separating these jobs from the actors that traditionally do these jobs gave us the runway to reimagine solutions.
Final results, including user feedback, metrics, and any impact the project had. In the course of designing a complex e-commerce platform, we faced significant challenges related to user navigation and checkout processes.
