Project Context

A West Monroe team must display data visually for a dental service provider (10K employees).

A machine learning, healthcare, data science, and technology consultant team has been working on a data model that processes claims more accurately for the client. They need to display their findings in a visually appealing way. Due to NDA, some content has been modified and blurred for client confidentiality.

Success

I must deliver the design before the deadline.

The design needs to be delivered to the consultants by the end of the 4-week design phase because soon after the deadline, the team will present the work to the client’s VP, CTO, and CFO.

Team + Role

I collaborated with another designer on designs for 5 consultants.

In addition to the 5 consultants who would serve as our primary stakeholders, I collaborated with a more experienced product designer. We bounced ideas off each other and worked on the designs from start to finish.

Initial Idea

The team felt an interactive document would enhance their upcoming presentation.

This document would be in the form of a Figma prototype. The deliverable will allow the user to reveal and manipulate data through thoughtful animations, keeping the viewer engaged. Additionally, the document could also be presentable when printed on paper.

Challenge

Two weeks into the project, the deliverable pivoted into a prototype.

The consultant team notified my partner and me that plans had changed. It meant we would start from square one with just 2 more weeks before the deadline. Additionally, model data continued to be unavailable. So, placeholder text and guessing had to be used to counter the vagueness.

New Deliverable

We created a dashboard that conveyed the consultant team’s data model output.

The process involved creating placeholder widgets on the screen and waiting until the consultant team handed me and my partner data from the model. Once we had some data in our hands, we moved elements around and bounced ideas off one another while catering to the consultant team’s recommendations, critiques, and changes in content.

One Designer

My partner went on PTO, making me the sole designer in implementing and responding to team feedback.

Nearing the last week, I became the only designer in charge, and for the next 4 days, I adjusted and modified the current design as additional data came in. In the end, I had addressed 26 critiques and recommendations from the team.

Outcome

The designs allowed the consultant team to impress the client, scoring a contract renewal for the firm.

We delivered the designs with days to spare for the team to make any last-minute changes to the numbers before their presentation to the client’s Vice President, CFO, and CTO. Between the visuals and the team’s excellent insights, the firm scored a contract renewal. Our designs will live on in the form of a Powerbi dashboard.

Reflections

I learned the power of auto-layout in a fast-paced team setting.

This project taught me the importance of letting go of my work and adapting to unforeseen changes. In a setting where design is fluid, auto-layout has proven time and again to be instrumental in making design more manageable by allowing me to make changes to the content quickly.

I am glad I upskilled myself on Figma’s auto-layout over a weekend early in the project when I realized my experience with the feature was not up to standards and may slow down the project. If I had not done that, I would not have been able to take on my partner’s side of the work for a brief time.