After an effort from the business to give access to the “My Garage” section of the site to anyone with an account (from 5% to 100%), a new group of customers had issues viewing the information that was important to them. We also wanted to help them make better decisions on how to shop for parts and services for those trucks.

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Our fleet management platform was initially built to only show a small amount of information. So I started at the beginning to think through the future of this platform and designed a future state to be scalable enough to hold lots of types on information. More dense, more helpful, with input from existing customers.

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Then reduced, reduced, reduced until I had something we could deliver on a much shorter timeframe.

We had this miscommunication problem with our developers. They wanted us to design screens at two, three and sometimes four different breakpoints to account for specific elements on the page not behaving properly when the screen was resized.

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By hooking up the design system to Figma Make, giving it some specific instructions, and pointing it to specific desktop components in the prompt, I was able to have it create new mobile versions of those components so that we could move them into the design system.

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On top of that, we were able to better show developers how elements were to behave once they’re in production. With this small change in our workflow, we eliminated ~20min on average of total back-and-forth communication with our developers per work item.

Sometimes sellers on our platform have ideas of features they want that are at odds with what we think is the best experience. They may have an idea of how they want something to work, unaware that there’s a better way.

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They’ll ask for a faster horse when we know we can deliver them a car.

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For instance, during the “Multi-VIN” project, they asked for a way to compare coverages against each other. After some probing and some iteration, I realized that what they really wanted was more visibility into the current truck coverages.

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It was information that was often hidden from them. So I put that info front and center which alleviated that concern and provided a path forward.

One of the big problems we were facing was losing time to late-stage design changes. We weren’t getting the right feedback early enough in the process.

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Because our designs touch so many departments, the time toward the end of the design process is super critical. It should be the time when we’re dialing in the details. So when new people come into the process at this stage with new information, it’s pretty disruptive.

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So I suggested we make a change. First off, we need a better understanding of who needs to sign off on decisions for which products and features. One of the things I discovered while at Microsoft that was helpful for group alignment was a visual mapping of the team leads and their area of expertise.

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That, on top of an idea that my manager had --presenting design overviews in team lead meetings for full visibility-- we had something we thought would help save us time in our design process.

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We also proposed a couple other changes to the business process:

• Meetings where UX is at all involved should always have some UI for everyone to react to
• Meetings agendas need to be updated and the correct people need to be notified that they need to be in the meeting

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Improving the business process improved our design process in a beautiful little flywheel.

One of my favorite recent changes to my design process is documenting how things change over time.

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Before, I was just moving old iterations to an archive section on the canvas to reference later if I need to. The problem was there was never any context to why I chose the direction I chose so I couldn’t communicate that to someone else if I wanted to.

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Now, if I go in a direction I do a quick write-up and place it on the canvas. And instead of moving it to a “junk drawer” I include it right along side the current iterations. So now I can present the full picture of how the designs changed over time and what inputs caused it to change.

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A small change but super helpful.

I’ve worked in a handful of different industries. Gaming, Automotive, E-Commerce, Financial -- the list goes on.

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Early on, I would just try to cram as much information as I could without any kind of plan. I thought that if I hear enough information I’d eventually understand it and how to use it. It worked OK, but I forgot a lot of information.

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Understand business constraints

Now, I take a more targeted approach. When I started at Daimler, I made a point of understanding the business processes that provide a lot of the constraints that guide the design process. For example, there’s a system called “OWL” that’s referenced a lot. It stands for Online Warranty Links; which is the system that provides all the warranty and claims information related to vehicle parts.

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OWL is slow and outdated but it’s one of the systems we rely on to generate warranty info for customers. So understanding what it can and can’t do helps me design against it.

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Listening tour

Another thing I do now is talk to people early to gain some of the institutional knowledge available at a company. Within the first 3 months of starting at Daimler I had 9-10 conversations with people across business, technical and sales.

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I then fed those notes to Claude to understand how their comments could relate to me as a designer. I just do this over and over again.

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Generalize

I also try to repeat back any new information and generalize it. Metaphors are my best friend. For instance, instead of saying “we need a customer account to be connected to a dealer account with their DTNA ID”, I’ll rephrase it in meetings and in my head as “we need to link two user accounts together” -- that way I can more easily call on my experience in other domains.

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What if a game studio could leverage Copilot to pull players’ highlights (with consent ofc), format and post them to socials to help build the community around a new game?

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This is an exploration I did a while ago while working on the game dev side at Xbox. One of the big things that helps new games gain traction is community and word of mouth.