Podium Lendlease
The Team
Product Designers | Project Managers | Dev Teams | Project Owner | Industry Experts | Stakeholders
The Problem
The Business: To stay competitive in the building industry we need to automate the way we approach the construction industry.
The User: A Development Manager at the early stages of origination
Making the most profit possible on any given site (which they call the highest and best value)
Developer Managers waste a lot of time on administrative work, collecting and connecting information to find the best solution, and have little time to run multiple scenarios to give the most back to the community.
My Role
Conducting user interviews and user testing sessions
Facilitating ideation sessions
Providing low fidelity and high fidelity designs
Contributing to and assisting in management of the UI design systems
Mentoring new Designers
The MVP Journey
Early thinking - Developing a Solution
Research
Obtaining the relevant context, understanding the problems the development managers face on a daily basis. Prior research was done on what development managers do, their main concerns and what they deal with on a daily basis.
Planning - Mapping Out Short/Long Term Goals
Using what we called the “war room” we’d map out features along a road map along side their sprint goals and long term goals.
With a product of this size, it was broken down by features.
How do we determine which features Development managers need to make their jobs more efficient?
Early Sketches
User Interviews and User Testing
Defining the User: The Development Manager
Goal: Obtaining user feedback enables us to tie into the overall problem statement and generate a more accurate solution for the user.
Role: Scribe, Co-Facilitator
Task: Record observations and filter through recordings for qualitative data and quantitative data.
Assist with interviews through further probing questions if applicable.
Back to the drawing(Miro) board
Collaborative problem solving and gaining insights.
After gathering data from user testing, pain points are drawn from the data and the current design once again is revisited
Many user interviews were conducted using different customers. We needed to grasp an understanding of who a typical user would be and their mental framework.
The Persona
Use Cases and Ideation
After synthesising the research information gathered, we began the journey of ideating potential solutions and solving for the main painpoint of alleviating the amount of admin work it takes to build a brief.
Below are examples an iteration of the ideation journey for solving the “admin work” pain point.
Post MVP/Q4 Release Features
Information architecture study
Building up the information architecture was based off a combination of user research, knowing our archetypes and revising the current state of the entire application.
The aim was to standardise a familiar look and feel across all envision features to help our users familiarise themselves with a complex product.
By conducting this study it helped other designers within the team to contribute and keep our knowledge centralised by adhering to a set of design rules
Through the research done, a series of design snippets are listed here. This involves the Development of the design system through feature needs.
Features here in Lendlease Podium are treated like product verticals.
Facade
Workspaces
Residential floorplate layouts
Financial Feasibility
Analysis Simulation
Feature Designs
Facade Feature
What we’re looking at here is the Facade feature.
This allowed development managers to get an early estimation of the amount of revenue they could earn with a particular design. Enabling the Development managers to get this information early would decrease the amount of manual admin work done.
Floorplate Configuration
Following the information architecture template, early stages of the residential floor plate configurator was based off UK Apartment Standards. Ensuring each apartment abided with the ResiDNA guidelines. As a development manager, they would be able to configure their apartment complex so that they can save admin time and optimise their floor plate.
Financial Feasibility low fidelity Designs and Research
The financial feasibility was built around the information architecture table above. As a Development manager, they could view their early feasibility assessment of the current massing within a selected scenario so that they can balance and flag early financial risks.
Envision Design System v1
Early stages of the design system.
Reflection
Lessons learned
Personal challenges and how I overcame them.
Working remotely has increased the level of difficulty when communicating across teams.
Being open, transparent as well as reaching out first has closed the gap of miscommunication.
Future Plans
The current product is still in it’s early stages of development, it would be a pleasure to see how this product develops overtime.
Develop a robust, scalable design system that can easily onboard new designers and other team members by making the UI design to dev process more streamlined.
Pushing the bounds of creativity and personality into the product as it grows.