Synopsis
A brief tour of the product space
At Granicus, we designed, built, and launched Peak Agenda Management, a SaaS single-page application, for government staff in small towns.
Our objective was to ship a user-friendly platform that streamlined agenda workflows for municipalities with populations of less than 100,000.
The Peak tech stack included Ruby on Rails, HTML/CSS, and ReactJS.
Value proposition
I led a team in designing Peak Agenda Management, which aimed to open up sales whitespace, increase competitive advantage, and drastically reduce the time spent building public meeting agendas.
Peak Agenda Management aimed to open up sales whitespace and increase Granicus’ competitive advantage in the market by providing small municipalities with the following benefits:
- Minimal training time: Make it easy for government users to learn how to coordinate agendas and contribute agenda items.
- No upfront professional services costs: Eliminate the need for solution engineering and upfront professional services engagement.
- Easy setup and administration: Enable customer admins to quickly configure Peak and get their team up and running in less than a day.
- Collaborative workflows: Empower everyone who touches the agenda for a public meeting to collaborate on agenda items, from initial draft to final version.
The Team
As Manager of User Experience, I served my small-but-mighty team in a player-coach role. The UX team comprised a junior UI designer, a UX Strategist, and a Lead UX Researcher.
In addition to people management, I was responsible for research, UX, UI design, and content development.
- Drove cross-functional alignment on UX outcomes by partnering with a Senior Product Manager, Engineering Lead, QA Engineer, and full-stack engineers
- Socialized UX value and process with trainings and presentations to Sales
- Hired the Lead UX Researcher, who was later promoted to Product Manager
Approach
Leveraging foundational user discovery and an early-stage design system, I ran a 2-week design sprint cadence.
I led the UX/UI team in discovery, design, and usability testing. Owned and led UX research (incl. contextual inquiry), socialized findings, and translated complex requirements into concepts, wireframes, prototypes, and high-fi designs
We designed, regularly tested, and launched Peak Agenda Management in the span of 7 months.
Key results
Our cost savings and our time savings and efficiency is definitely measurable. – Shane P., Borough Manager
Peak is much more user-friendly than our old system. – Daralyn S., Municipal Clerk
- DesignOps: I extended UX runway from < 2 weeks to > 2 months via cross-functional partnership, UX backlog management and design sprints.
- Minimal training: With Peak, we reduced training required from days to hours compared to the legacy product.
- Intuitive onboarding: A town clerk in Nevada was able to set up the admin console in just two hours without any training.
- Granicus operations:Peak’s intuitive self-service setup—designed entirely by my team and I—freed up bandwidth for Professional Services to focus on larger customer engagements.
The Journey
Coming soon
View more details about the journey on my portfolio archive.
I plan to migrate and update the case study in the coming weeks.
Here’s a few rave reviews from colleagues
I have found Jules to be not only highly insightful and effective, but genuinely driven towards the continual improvement of our products. …Jules’ drive for the best user experience also extends to internal customers. — Ashley G., Director, Customer Experience
JP has the professional skills and experience in user experience and intelligence to know what questions to ask, how to map the user journey, and how to translate this information into something meaningful. – Jeff S., Director, Client Executives
table:
| Team / Effort | May 2021 | Jun 2021 | Jul 2021 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inventory | Sell Landing Page and Offer Screen Redesign Study – Discovery | Sell Account Creation and Onboarding – Discovery | |
| MegaCart | Cart Wrapper | ||
| My Driveway | Preference Center Study | Save Search – Usability | |
| Learn | Top Navigation – Information Architecture Validation | Car Finder Quiz – Copy Validation | |
| Tool procurement | Tool secondary research: define procurement criteria | Tool demos and additional analysis | Business case creation and socialization with mid-level management |
