LeadingEdge™

LeadingEdge™

This project created a mind shift within Harvard Business Publishing—unlocking potential for how teams might rapidly develop truly user-centered products. Since its launch, LeadingEdge has garnered $18.8M in revenue and the processes our team created have become a blueprint for product development across the organization.

Here’s a presentation I gave that outlines our process:

My Role:
UX & Design Lead

Responsibilities:
• Competitive Review
• Design Studio Facilitation
• Visual Design
• Interaction Design
• Prototyping
• Evaluative Testing

The project began with the team being asked to refresh an existing offering. The interface was outdated, and there had been many bugs identified—along with known security risks.

Rather than create a punch list of user stories and have the developers start knocking them out as had been the historical approach on a project like this, I led the team to embrace an alternative approach: We Will Go Slow to Go Fast.

With this mantra, we identified real user needs, anchored ourselves with design principles, established a mobile-first strategy, and made great leaps on collaboration between design and development.

WHAT are core user needs?

From there, we mapped Carole’s journey through the existing offering to get a sense for what she might be thinking & feeling, and we identified her pain points & opportunities. 

WHERE are we going?

Once we understood whom we were designing for, and what the opportunities were, we codified a set of design principles to guide us in the design and development phases. 

To that end, we designed and built LeadingEdge as Mobile First. Furthermore, rather than waste time on static wireframes, we moved straight from sketches and visual comps to an end-to-end Interactive Prototype.

The team received huge benefits from discussing the prototype vigorously. We were able to use it for early testing—iterating based on feedback along the way. As we moved into development, the transition went exceptionally smoothly due to the alignment the team had achieved during the prototyping phase.

By having this range of disciplines participate in co-creating the design, we achieved greater buy-in on the direction—resulting in more efficient development and a higher quality offering.

Collaborating with the front-end developers by designing in the browser accelerated delivery significantly, and integrating a regular cadence of routine evaluative testing served to reduce QA cycles and kept the team aligned with business expectations.

UI Patterns 

Working closely with developers, we explored the interaction design for reordering a list of saved content. We ultimately arrived at a simple pattern (shown here).

User Flow 

We had a complicated task flow that varied by user. Some of the functionality was already built while other areas required new development or modification. This was a high stakes integration with our Oracle financial systems, so I created this flow chart to align the team and indicate what it would take to achieve the necessary results. 

Search 

Our content repository pulled together many new content types, so it was imperative we figure out how best to organize it for search filtering.

We had hypotheses about the importance of format vs. source, so I conducted a card sorting exercise with a range of internal stakeholders and external participants to better explore what themes might emerge. The results of the study helped us make decisions such as combining digital and magazine articles types under “Articles” and removing the redundant variations of “Harvard” that proceed most asset types.