Bad UX Design, Happy Ending

In my first major information architecture project I learned a lot about balancing the company’s goals with the user experience. Most interesting, was how the problem I was trying to solve revealed an issue with the company culture. The design department needed to work collaboratively, but many designers felt possessive of their design files. This caused disorganization, huge amounts of redundant files, and massive storage problems.

Upper management at my design firm thought we could probably solve this problem through software, so one day I found myself attending an interdepartmental meeting to discuss the possible implementation of a new PLM software system (product lifecycle management). Sounds boring, right? I certainly thought so at first, but when I discovered this software was going to be a central part of my workflow every day, I became very interested.

My colleagues in attendance were all design directors, who managed the work of their individual teams. The sales person doing the presentation told us how every one of our team’s designs would be meticulously logged into their system. I remember thinking, this product is going to squash creative ideation, and discourage iteration. This was clearly the wrong use-case scenario for this program.

The sales person initiated a walk-through with me to show how the program worked. She asked me to add a new design to the system, but I couldn’t find an option or button to do this. She instructed me to right-click inside a blank field and then select an option from the menu that appeared.

I blurted out, “Well, that’s not intuitive at all. How would I just know to right-click in a random empty area to complete this task?”

She laughed and said, “I can see that you’re a non-linear thinker.”

Somewhat offended, and not really knowing what a non-linear thinker was, I asked, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

She said, “You creative types usually don’t understand how this program works because you are used to using Macs.”

I said, “Well, who is this software designed for anyway? Maybe your software engineers should consider the people who actually use the program.”

The meeting did not go well for that sales person. She offended one of the stakeholders (me), and inadvertently did a usability test that failed, revealing to me that this product was probably not tested with real users.

Needless to say, we did not purchase that software. It was a really off-putting experience, but it got me thinking about our processes. The reason I had to sit through that meeting at all was because there was a breakdown in our file organization system, and it was extremely frustrating to the product management team.

About the same time, the company was about to migrate all of its files to a new server. I recognized an opportunity to fix this organization problem we were having by introducing a new folder structure and file naming convention that could support collaborative design work. So I teamed up with a product manager and another design director to create a proposal to present to the COO.

At the time, all the product designers were responsible for keeping track of their own design files, and would often store them on their hard drive rather than on the server in a mutually accessible location. Everyone had their own system. If someone was out of the office, or left the company, or had hard drive failure, this became a huge, expensive problem for the company.

So I proceeded to interview designers who were widely acknowledged as being “organized” to see what processes they had in place. I also talked to product managers to understand some of their frustrations. We categorized all the different types of files, and considered their purpose or function. We examined the workflows of employees to make sure the structure would help them become more efficient.  

Through strategic thought, research, testing and interdepartmental collaboration, we created a file organization system that is intuitive, collaborative and able to accommodate the company’s vast and ever-growing archive of design files. After the implementation of the system, everyone noticed a much higher level of collaboration within teams and between departments. It felt like a major positive culture shift and a success. Five years later, I’m happy to say that the company is still using this system.