Powering Florida is a business organization part of FPL that is focused on economic development for various municipalities within the state. Their innovative tool, Resource Center, provided data insights to various user types who are interested in growing their businesses and need to make informed decisions with analytics to support their proposals.
The Resource Center needed a major overhaul to help users be more proactive in their research, analyze and consume information at a glance, and build more collaboration amongst their organization. As the design lead, I spearheaded the team into a deep discovery phase of the system as it stands today, identified new opportunities to implement, and worked with designers to create the future experience for Resource Center 2.0
The first step was understanding the goals needed for the Resource Center. I worked closely with the main stakeholder by creating a relationship in understanding this new initiative, where the problems were, and how we could collaborate together. By setting clear expectations, I was able to clearly define the goals and deliverables while working with the project manager in scoping the timeline.
From there, I did a deep heuristic analysis of the current system using best practices for UX auditing. This helped us identify where the gaps were and areas of improvement. Key focal areas I identified included:
• Information Architecture and Organization: Could users navigate and access key features within the system.
• Error Prevention: Did the system provide good error messages if a user went down the wrong path.
• Aesthetic and minimalist design: Did the interface not overwhelm the user from making progress in their daily activities.
• Ease of Access: Could users enter into the system and perform tasks without getting blocked or confused.
One of the next suggested activities with our stakeholder was emphasizing the need to talk to real users. This was a great opportunity to really understand how the different types of users from multiple organizations used the Resource Center. After speaking with the client, who thought this was a great idea, we were able to interview several users who used the system in different ways.
Being able to talk to users, I took this opportunity as the design lead to help junior designers practice their interview skills by taking lead in having the conversation while supporting them in the background.
Lastly, I organized a competitive / comparative analysis by looking at other companies out in the wild who had similar features and resources for their own economic development. This resulted in creating an insightful presentation of best practices for the stakeholder to understand and get inspiration from. What I learned was:
• Region Economic Developers often focused on user types because of the broad spectrum of goals and information seeking in their processes.
• Data visualization plays a heavy role in providing insights to users on how to make smart decisions and truly understand the advantages being offered.
• Anticipating questions a user might have by surfacing answers on the spot allowed users to have a seamless experience in their everyday workflow.
Based on the findings from the discovery, I was able to identify some key themes to help guide the design and engage the stakeholder understand our next steps.
By including it on the signup page, backing it up with key data points, and ensuring that the data is actionable, relevant, and interpretable to users.
By letting them define their needs, teaching them how to use the available tools, and incorporating interactive elements where possible.
To clarity and minimize the amount of back-and-forth by prioritizing navigation options, categorizing content by users’ goals, and anticipating user questions & actions.
By having a clear understanding of the user needs and wants, the next step was to begin the conceptual ideation phase. Conceptual Ideation focuses on exploring ideas that need refinement and gaining stakeholder buy-in before production work commences. This way the design isn’t invested too heavily without first thinking through the experience.
Success is driven by not moving the needle blindly forward, but specifically towards the right mindsets that create exceptional experiences for the users while meeting the goals of the business requirements.
As part of the conceptual phase, I led a brainstorm activity on Figma. This was a great opportunity to help new designers feel collaborative while also showing you can work as a team online. By presenting the research and findings, we brainstormed features and ideas that could be added into the future vision of Resource Center 2.0.
From there, we then affinity mapped similar patterns and groupings of shared ideas. This helped us map and prioritize what features made the most sense for the user types based on our previous interviews.
After having a good idea of the ideas we wanted to design for, our next step was putting this into a storyboard for the client to see how the everyday journey of their users could utilize the new features. This was important cause it helped them visualize our suggestions and buy into the idea of redefining key opportunities.
I then mapped out key use cases to help identify and inventory a list of scenarios uses would interact within their product. This ensures that all possible actions are thoroughly considered before jumping into the design.
From there, I led the team in building out the information architecture for our various user types. I directed the team and gave critical feedback on creating both a sitemap of the new resource center vs how it compared to the previous one.
I also lead the creation of several user flows for development and sign off. The user flows helped visualize how are users could complete tasks they were seeking within the product. This helped identify how many screens were needed, what order they should appear in, and a list of components needed to progress forward.
The next step was to now start bringing the design to life. Before diving into the UI, I first sketched out ideas that could help with the design. This helps me not commit to one particular set of designs, but really understand how the system should work based on the use cases and requirements we identified.
Then working closely with a visual design team, I helped lead the design creation of the Resource Center for production development.
Currently, the Resource Center is being developed and I continue to work with the Development in supporting any questions they have about the design system, prototype, and technology questions. As a design lead, I help to ensure the design is being development with the highest standards. The primary stakeholder was blown away with our final designs and very pleased with how this uplift not only met the branding guidelines of the FPL design system as a whole, but how we focused on ensuring the interactions and desired features met those expectations of everyday users.
"It's as if you knew exactly what I was thinking without me having to explain how it works. I think our power users will be overall very happy with how modernized the Resource Center is going to be, and how it will make their everyday tasks easy and simple to do. Amazing job all around."
- Stakeholder
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