PROJECT OVERVIEW
The Engineer’s Platform Experience team or EPX aimed to create an internal development platform for the firm’s 43,000 software engineers.
SOLUTION
One-Stop-Shop for anything the engineer would need to know
Centralized Hub
1
Specific Pages for Best Practices / Tools
2
User - Generated Content
3
How might we reduce cognitive overload and provide a frictionless experience for our engineers?
These were my own notes that I took during my onboarding process at EPX.
MOTIVATION
Analysis of current process
The EPX team has existed for less than 100 days when I was onboarded as an UX design intern. During time, I had the opportunity to speak with and meet engineers to hear about their work.
I learned about their processes and understood why certain protocols were used.
Onboarding Takes Forever…
The onboarding process for all DDP interns lasted for two weeks. The first week involved setting up hardware / software and program introduction second week.
Constant Context Switching
Speaking with engineers at the firm, they often juggle coding tasks, meetings, and emails. This multi-tasking kills productivity and burdens our engineers.
Fragmented Engineering Experience
This disconnected experience slows down engineers and contributes to cognitive overload. How can we provide the tools / support to better empower our engineers?
Less Testing -> Slower Deployments
Multi-tasking draws focus away from critical tasks such as testing and deployments. This is where our engineers shine in the development of quality software.
What the process could be:
RESEARCH
Onboarding vs. Finding Information
Onboarding
Quicker Onboard
Team Specific
Faster Deployments
Search
Accelerate Deployments
Accelerate Troubleshooting
Organized Data Required
Reduces Cognitive Overload
Feasibility
With only 3 months to work on this, we quickly generated a couple ideas on what we could deliver to our engineers.
Tradeoffs to consider.
Creating an easier onboarding experience would beneficial in getting engineers up and running quicker. However, each team's onboard would be unique meaning there would be many variations of the experience.
Creating a more efficient way to find information could potentially accelerate deployments and troubleshooting. And to execute this direction, this would require organizing information under a universal system.
Since the formation of our organization was centered on multiplying the value of our engineer's work so that they can spend more time creating and innovating, we decided that designing a efficient way to find information would be more worth our time.
User Flow
DESIGN PROCESS
Gathering Information
We decided to organize the contents of the toolkit under categories such as practices, guides, activities, workshops, and templates.
Inspiration
CONCLUSION AND LESSONS LEARNED
Growth as a UX designer
Going into this summer as a UX Design Intern with JPMorgan Chase & Co, I hoped to delve deeper into the financial technology space as well as practice product visioning, leadership, and refinement of my design craft. And this experience provided me with that, as expected.
Communications is critical
Working on this project has also taught me how crucial communication is, when working in interdisciplinary teams. On our team, we had other interns that were from a developer background and a researcher background. During the times where I wore the project leader hat, I noticed how critical it was for work to be shared to support quick iteration. We would not have been able to move as quickly as we did had it not been for our team’s flawless communication.
Democratizing design practices
As I continue to develop my craft and design values, I will remember this project for how it democratizes design. By establishing a foundation or even a platform for designers in JPMorgan Chase & Co, senior and junior designers together can build a knowledge bank that everyone can access. And to me, building tools that enable these futures are what excite me as a designer.
For work inquiries or to chat with me, email me at anthonywudesign@gmail.com
Thanks for reading~
