ORGANIZING MESSES

The items I've pulled together on this page were either part of discovery on large projects, or were artifacts I created to help my team or other teams understand a mess. Some of these were incomplete initiatives, some were part of projects that have gone live, others were internal non-client facing.

When I refer to things as "messes", I mean in the way Abby Covert refers to them in her book "How To Make Sense Of Any Mess", "which is a gnarly complex challenge with many facets and full of difficulty".

A parallel initiative to the MyRocket Dashboard was assessing our current navigation strategy. The current navigation structure had remained in place but as different companies and services slotted into the larger platform ecosystem, it became clear that certain things about the navigation were causing struggle for users.  

A big issue with this particular mess, but likely not unique to it was a problem of language. With multiple teams all vying for a space in the Rocket platform, there had developed an established yet undefined vocabulary for certain important things in our information architecture. The two things that stood out to me that were causing some confusion in the navigation were products and tools.

I started asking questions about each of those words, gathering other team member mental models of the words, and thinking about creating a shared definition for each that could be agreed upon. From my Figjam space of notes, my team and I collaborated on a navigation strategy presentation to share around the company. The definitions around products and tools was an important story piece to that presentation.  

A parallel initiative to the MyRocket Dashboard was figuring out how a user would arrive to their dashboard for the first time and what would they see. We knew users could come in from many different doors and that whichever door would affect how they were onboarded and what things they'd see on their dashboard. So it became a problem to solve how users were coming into the dashboard, how would we personalize onboarding to them, and how would we personalize their dashboards.

This work would ultimately help the team as we designed and released MVP versions of our onboarding experience and MyRocket Dashboard.

I worked on this next project for only a short time. Our company reorganized and the project went to a dedicated team. The personal loans division of Rocket (Rocket Loans) was looking to redesign their client servicing experience. It was clear after user testing the current experience that findability and wayfinding were not matching user mental models.

So as part of the discovery phase of the project, we created jobs-to-be-done statements based on: the initial user test findings, essential user needs, and business use cases. I organized the JTBDs into larger bucket categories and then vertically by most important priority to least.

This artifact was one of a few that I created when assigned to this project.

One of the internal messes I helped make sense of was in an effort to help business stakeholders understand different client metrics that can be measured and when to use them. I worked in tandem with a design strategist but ultimately came up with this visual. I worked through a few visuals before being inspired by metro train maps. As an additional artifact, I created a table format for the data.