Introduction

Summary

Role

Product Designer, responsible for all major deliverables - user flows, prototypes, competitive audits, internal feature audits, and UX frameworks

Duration

Team

Interaction Designer / Project Lead, Design Lead, Client Lead, and Adobe Stakeholders

 The Current State   

Problem Context

Adobe doesn't give IT Admins enough granular control over their organization's security to meet their needs. So they choose to disable everything, which doesn't allow end-users to share and collaborate. This severely impacts cloud service adoption.

CURRENT STATE

Walls of disabled services in the organization, because of security concerns, negatively impact collaboration.

IDEAL STATE

IT Admins trust the security system enough to enable sharing pathways for end-users. Security still stays intact due to intelligent automated safeguards in place.

To gain Admin's trust,  Adobe should provide:

 Digging deeper   

Using Adobe services,  what can a user do today? 

Adobe vs. others?

 The Key Opportunity

How might we deliver business-grade capabilities that enable customers to adopt Adobe’s cloud services with trust and reliability?

 Design Approach

Setting up larger goals:

Collaborating with 18 Stakeholders including PMs & Engineers:

The ideal UX Flow (high-level)

Prioritizing and Roadmapping 150+ Features

From sketches to wireframes

Here are some of the notes and snapshots from my process (learning -> SME -> brainstorming) before getting to a high-fidelity prototype that walks us through the experience from the eyes of the admin and end-users.

 The End Result

What's the final experience for users:

 Success and Wins

We took the time to define our goals, get stakeholders aligned, and established design principles to guide us. As a result, our concepts and wireframes met the key project objectives to the best of our knowledge. But here are some personal wins - 

1. The engineering manager who had set up the original project document for these features, personally told me that our concept made them realize an undiscovered use case.
2. Our core Adobe stakeholders defended the work that we’ve done without us having to say anything
3. Last I checked, we won future work on this project, and continuity of work is a success for any client-consultant relationship.
   

This is the project I'm most proud of - it was the most complex challenge I've encountered, covered the end-to-end process, and involved systems thinking (which I absolutely love).

One learning that I want to emphasize is the depth of benchmark/competitor analysis. I took way too much time to do it because we weren't aligned on what the ideal depth of exploration looked like. But the added extra depth I went to, came in handy when making design decisions based on how industry leaders do it.

(Yes, people do use Outlook too.)

Copyright © Hardik Kumar. All illustrations are hand-crafted (with an enormous amount of care) so please use them with credit and for educational purposes only. Thanks!

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