安全文件传输应用改造

At frog, I led a team of designers to redesign a secure file transfer product for IBM. I managed designers in Austin and in frog’s studio in India, reviewing work and setting priorities across both teams.

Research

We started by interviewing stakeholders and studying how the product worked and where it needed to go. User research was conducted remotely with large clients in finance.

Our research showed that the short-term focus needed to be on fixing glaring UI issues, while the long-term focus should be on evolving the software to be centrally managed.

Visual Design

I guided the visual designers on my team through the unique constraints of a secure enterprise product — what color means in a security context, and IBM’s strict brand and accessibility guidelines.

Interaction Design

The old product was unusable for anyone who wasn’t an engineer. There was genuine complexity — encryption, node handshakes, scripting — but none of it was so intrinsically complex that a normal person shouldn’t have been able to fire off a transfer. We fixed that.

One thing I learned on this project: it’s easy to convince yourself you can’t show the client anything until you fully understand the problem. That works for some projects. But if the thing is complicated enough, staying in the abstract only leads to more confusion.

At a certain point you have to make an attempt you know is wrong, just so you have something concrete to iterate on. We learned more from one conversation about a bad prototype than we did in weeks of prior discovery.

Outcome

Successful handoff to a new frog studio that I helped stand up.