Translations work management
0-to-1, end-to-end product design case study summary:
How to digitally transform a $700m+ org (and improve its entire production capacity) with one application
The following is a summary of the more detailed case study. Email me for more details.
The problem: How do we reimagine the infrastructure of a $700m+ company … and build it in-flight?
TransPerfect is the largest language services company in the world, currently a $1.2b, then a $700m+ business.
Their translations production infrastructure is responsible for a significant portion of their revenue, but was also suffering from growing inefficiencies common to a rocket ship company growing by leaps and bounds.
Dozens of attempts were made over the years to improve this but never quite fully addressed the problem, until the stakeholder responsible for this outcome came directly to me one day...
The outputs: Trimming a jungle of solutions down to a single tree
Through good research, vision, design, I led the design behind TransPerfect's first successful effort to unite their entire production work management process under a single product
Since its launch, it's been used by thousands of Project Managers (PMs) to run this complex process as a renewed, well-oiled machine at the heart of the company.
These screens seem like they're presented in isolation instead of in flow. This is deliberate.
I designed the entire system: permissions, status, actions, to have incredibly small interaction loops and thus require little sustained engagement.
The onboarding feature is in fact the longest flow in the entire product.
This efficiency made the product require almost no training once the aforementioned onboarding came online.
The outcomes: people love you when you cut their workload in half
Other evidence of impact includes:
Multiple departments in company changing their processes around the product
Mass abandonment of ongoing training sessions despite increased usage
Uncovered previously unknown behavior/process models, and supporting tools never realized in the company’s history.
Do everything, collaborate with everyone
The logistics of this project wasn't simple. We had various team members rotating and lots of work to do. However, I led the vision, collaboration, and execution from Design side at every single step in the project. taking on a considerable amount of the work that I thought was crucial to getting to a successful outcome and dealing with issues such as stakeholder "morale" and the users gaslighting themselves.
Primary responsibilties:
Product vision and strategy
Research, synthesis, usability
IA, workflow/process design
UI/content/interaction design
Major feature designs
Other responsibilities:
Visual design language
Dev collaboration/spec. writing
Delegating work for other designers
Collaboration:
4 to 8 - Developers
1 - Lead stakeholder, 2-6 rotating
2 - Product Managers
1 - Junior designer (Feature carve outs)
1 - Senior designer (Init. visual language)
1 - Myself (Everything else)
Deep data analysis and contextual inquiry
What drove success in a large project like this and much of my other work was knowing when to focus on learning vs action. In this case, all the mixed methods research, synthesis, and insight/principle development I executed greatly shed light on the nature of the problem space.
I dug so deep that it uncovered many previously unknown insights about TransPerfect's processes, changing how it approached them as an organization.
[Nathan's] problem solving and analysis of user and business problems went so deep that we found new ways to look at our problems and processes after decades in the business …
Hard analysis, soft syntheses, and tell the story of the entire process
Many people approach problems using prebaked frameworks; but these frequently don't represent the problem at hand.
To that end, I often develop bespoke approaches to visualizing problems. Here, I visualized landscapes and terrains of the problem space for the entire team regardless if the scope of the problem is workflow, feature, or even entire processes.
The above is a summary of how we took a total of 1 year to go from absolute zero to a successful V1 launch. This and immediate follow-up designs proved wholly transformational for the $1b company. Interested in the depths of the story? Send me an email.