Synopsis
A brief tour of the product space
Granicus enables over 5,500 North American public-sector organizations to efficiently serve and connect to their resident base.
Its broad product portfolio (prior to a private equity acquisition in late 2016) spanned legacy agenda management; boards and commissions management; and a suite of tools for recording, livestreaming, and documenting public meetings. Its customer base includes the United States House and Senate.
Peak Agenda Management joined Granicus’ portfolio in 2015 as 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.
- This would eliminate the need for small customers to buy, implement, and use our flagship agenda management solution, which was too complex for most small government workflows.
- The Peak tech stack included Ruby on Rails, HTML/CSS, and ReactJS.
Value proposition
Peak Agenda Management aimed to tap into sales whitespace, increase competitive advantage, and drastically reduce the time spent building and publishing public meeting agendas (ex: City Council, Planning Committee, etc.).
From a product strategy standpoint, Peak was purpose-built to provide 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.
- Collaborative workflows: Empower everyone who contributes to a public meeting agenda to collaborate on agenda items, from draft to final version.
- Easy setup and administration: Enable customer admins to quickly configure Peak and get their team up and running in less than a day.
- No upfront professional services costs: Eliminate the need for solution engineering and upfront professional services engagement.
The Team
As Manager of User Experience, I led 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, end-to-end product design, and content development.
During my 2 years at Granicus, I…
- 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, including a presentation during the January Sales Kickoff (SKO)
- Hired the Lead UX Researcher (backfill), 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 integrated with the agile SDLC. Working side-by-side with my team, I led discovery, design, and usability testing.
- In every sprint we conducted research, ideated, iterated, and aligned with Product and Engineering via product consultations and feasibility reviews.
- I owned and guided UX research (including contextual inquiry), socialized findings, and made recommendations.
- I collaborated closely with my UX Strategist, Matt B. to translate complex requirements into concepts, wireframes, prototypes, and high-fi designs.
Our design sprint process and strong cross-functional partnerships enabled us to regularly deliver high-quality designs in pace with Engineering’s 2-week sprint cadence.
We launched Peak in September 2015, in the span of 7 months.
Key results
Peak is much more user-friendly than our old system. – Daralyn S., Municipal Clerk
Our cost savings and our time savings and efficiency is definitely measurable.
– Shane P., Borough Manager
Peak’s intuitive Admin console—designed entirely by my team and me—enabled quick and easy self-service setup for both admins and other users.
- Reduced training and onboarding time by 90%: With Peak, we reduced training required from 10 days to less than 1 day, compared to the legacy product.
- Intuitive Admin set up: A town clerk in Nevada was able to set up the Admin console in just 2 hours without any training.
- Reduced operational overhead for Granicus: The self-service onboarding freed up bandwidth for Professional Services to focus on complex engagements with larger customers.
Achievements
- DesignOps: I extended our UX runway from less than 2 weeks to over 2 months via cross-functional partnership, UX backlog management, and design sprints.
- Design durability: The popover menu I designed is still in use today, as evidenced by this Granicus knowledge base article. I took the screenshots under “Designing the UI” (below), from the embedded video.
The agile design journey
Mapping the product usage ecosystem
Designing the UI
Below is a high-level example of my process for designing UI and what the technical implementation looks like (still largely untouched in the training environment as of February 2020).
More coming soon
View more details about the journey on my portfolio archive.
I plan to migrate additional process images in the coming weeks.
Rave reviews from colleagues
All reviews are from spring 2017
Jules absolutely has the nuts and bolts of UX down and is a fabulous mentor and teacher because of that. I can’t tell you how much I’ve learned over the last couple years as their direct report. – Matt B., UX Strategist
Jules’ leadership and UX/UI role was invaluable in the Agile development of a web-based agenda management system. – Doug M., Senior QA Engineer
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
Jules excels at creating transparency into their team’s work and never hesitates to share time, energy, and advice across departments when asked. – Emilie B., Marketing Manager
Jules 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
