Integrating Complex Apps - Ashley R. Smith - Senior Experience Designer

Integrating Lessonly and Seismic

Seismic
‍Product Designer
Nov 2021 - July 2022

Before this case study, customers were able to switch between 3 app experiences: Lessonly Training, Lessonly Skills, and Seismic's core product. All with distinctive experiences, stakeholders had to juggle between system challenges and overlapping functionality. In an extreme collaborative effort, we set out to create a vision of the ideal integration between these 3 digital worlds.

The problem we solved:

How might we integrate multiple standalone, feature-dependent products that will align with customer’s mental model and day-to-day workflow?

The process and my role:

The Process

Key Points

Highly collaborative effort across 3 teams
Facilitated an ideation session with all 6 of the Lessonly (aka Learning) designers who had expert knowledge of their product areas
Communicated and facilitated meetings more than designing

Some challenges:
‍Of course, this process was not as linear as this visual communicates; we often jumped around and even backtracked since it was easy for anyone to misinterpret goals, miss decisions that were made, or not have an opportunity to offer input. This resulted in a need to over-communicate, put out fires, and even voice concerns more than designing the experience itself.

My Role

My role was to lead the charge in designing a high-level vision for how Lessonly Training and Lessonly Skills can integrate into 1 experience, renamed to "Training." Since the 2 experiences were designed to work very similar, this was an easier step 1 before integrating 2 systems that were completely different (Seismic and Lessonly).

Another Designer's role

Another Product Designer's role was to create a high-level vision for how Training and Seismic's existing product can integrate into 1 experience.

Solution 1 of 2: The Long-Term Vision

With a long and bumpy process, we were able to deliver the first-draft of how Lessonly Training and Skills can work together.

The major changes were:

Learners (Lessonly’s end-users) can see skills, assigned content, events, and certification on the same dashboard (Skill levels and training content were 2 separate environments before, which resulted in misunderstanding of their connection and lack of usage of Skills).
Skills is the foundational element that branches out into training and learning content (In terms of mental model, the ideal hierarchy for a Learner is 1. Understanding the skills I need to build, then 2. Viewing what training content is connected to that skill. The experience should reflect that same process.)
For admins, skills are treated as another "element" when managing all content within the application (Before the change, admins had to switch between environments to create skills, to edit content, and to link those skills back to the appropriate content. This was heavy-weight and often resulted in admins not going through the trouble.

Some Screens of the highlighted Moments

Short-Term Solution

Another Product Designer lead the effort to conceptualize how Training can integrate into the broader Seismic environment. At the time of my transition out of Seismic, the short-term goal was to iframe the Skills and Training experiences into the Seismic environment in a way that aligns with their structural UX and UI patterns.

Here is my interpretation of how this goal can work. This was not finalized when I left, but I was apart of the ideation and conversations, so I had an idea of what the team was envisioning.

Consider the below screen as conceptual and not what was actually designed/built within the company.

Process Assets

For some of the design activities I helped facilitate, here are a few examples of the outcome!

Current features and where they overlap

Before we could truly ideate, we needed to outline all of the different product features across all environments and identifying overlap. This helped us eliminate duplicate functionality and create a more cohesive workflow. Below, the bullets with the same highlight color served the same function.

Features

Document and Content Management
Knowledge-based Information Tracking
Data and Insights

Features

Training Creation and Completion
Grading and Feedback Resources
Repeated Practice Scenarios and Learner-led Training
Data and Insights

Features

Assessments
Creation of Coaching Plans
Tracking of Assessments and Coaching Plans
Tasks
Assessment Data and Skill Insights

The Ideal User Flow

For the Lessonly Training and Skills products, it was important for us to understand the ideal user flow based on customers' behavior at the time. Then, we highlighted which solutions linked back to that step in the flow, which provided a high-level understanding of how to best position each feature in the overall workflow of Lessonly.

An Ideation Session with Other Designers

Each designer on the Lessonly teams had expert knowledge in different product areas. Instead of working in a silo, I facilitated a session with designers for us to educate each other on how the products operate and on the future goals/considerations. Then, we all brainstormed how to update the user flow outlines above. Here are a few screen grabs of that ideation in InVision Freehand!