Chris Gervais | Full Stack Product Designer

TechInsights

Currently leading the unified platform redesign at TechInsights for our company goal of 100k active users in 2023.

My Role

UX/UI Design

The Team

Design Director
UX Designers x3

Tools

Miro, Figma, Adobe CC

Timeline

Ongoing

Themes

Design Research, Information Architecture, UX/UI Design , Responsive Development, Design Patterns, Design Systems, UX Research, Design Prototyping, Language Localization, Project Management

Learn

Background Research, Stakeholder Interviews, User Personas, User Needs, Business Needs

Plan

Heuristic Evaluation, Information Architecture, User Flow

Design

Content, Look, IA and Flow

Prototype

Hi-Fi Prototype

Hand off

All assets to DX team Dev

PROJECT OVERVEIW

A single platform experience for all users.

TechInsights, a leader servicing the semiconductor industry experiencing tremendous growth has historically existed as separate platforms with individual teams maintaining their own source of standards for UI elements, components, modules, and datasets in both the front-end and back-end of these systems. We needed a strong foundation to allow fairly quick, production-ready integration of content from legacy and acquired companies into a single user interface, and to increase Active Users to apply to all the company’s offerings, and all of its customers.

PLATFORM GOALS

Balancing the platform needs and user needs.

With no shortage of tasks for our UX team to manage, it was important to keep the the primary goals of the platform in the forefront. Increase active users, and manage ongoing content integration for new and legacy sources.

Specific goals of this single user interface:

  • Increase Active Users – minimum 100k in 2023
  • Content integration – from legacy and acquisition sources into a single user interface

Why Active Users is Key:

  • Improve the Quality of Revenue
  • Increase Revenue Growth
  • Optimize the Value of the product
  • Syndicate Content
  • Showcase the TechInsights brand

CHALLENGES AND RISKS

Understanding the business case of end-to-end platform unification.

Designing for a platform end-to-end means really understanding the bigger picture. We knew there would be user specific challenges to solve for, but this was a design challenge that also took the whole organization and company direction into account. This meant meeting the needs of users, but also multiple business units and internal departments.

Platform Challenges:

  • Serve new content types
  • Flexible product definitions
  • Content interaction
  • Content ingestion automation
  • Performance and stability
  • Content authoring and content structure
  • User interactions in platform
  • Understand user behavior
  • Cost control

User Challenges:

  • Onboarding
  • Search
  • Discovery
  • Organize
  • Link/Download
  • Administrator Oversight
  • Recognize Roi

Risks:

  • Alignment of all teams
  • Timely resourcing of Software and Platform teams
  • Incoming acquisitions needing priority
  • Technical debt in the Platform
  • New day-to-day Platform requests

Prototype Examples

Documenting the legacy platforms

Outcomes of Legacy UI… The Fundamentals – this needs to be generic – this list can be what some of the screens or collage of UI below can show.

  • Navigate verticals and channels
  • Search
  • View PDFs, XLS, images, blogs, videos
  • Analytics
  • BOM DB
  • Progress Tracker
  • Content Roadmap
  • Product Overview
  • Custom Libraries
  • PDF Annotations
  • Sharing
  • Support
  • Live Chat
  • Meet the CEM
  • Quick start guide
  • Banner
  • Basic and premium users (aka self-requested trials)
  • Immersive trials
  • Notifications
  • Account settings
  • Seminars

What’s next (end)

  • HTML-based reports
  • Collaboration tools
  • Customer content creation
  • Web/Mobile UI integration

Key User Interface Concepts

Single user interface available to all users:

  • UI doesn’t adjust based on persona, but is flexible based on intent
  • UI/UX doesn’t constrain people to our view of them
  • Users can choose to use the parts of the UI that work for them
  • This allows work done to support different personas to be discovered by others – and they’ll find ways to leverage them that we’d never expected, allowing us to learn

We can still sell multiple products around related content to the same customer

  • For example, selling a customer a few Logic channels but also TechLibrary
  • The UI does adjust based on entitlement
    Example: Only buying a Logic channel won’t provide IP-style searches or results
    Example: Only buying TechLibrary won’t provide channel views or obviously subs-only content

Data Visualizations

EULA and Onboarding

Getting Started with the platform

Purchasing and Checkouts

Various UIs

Contact me at chris@cgervais.ca