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Enterprise UX at Ford Motor Company
DISCLAIMER: In order to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of Ford’s internal processes, some information and visuals throughout the study have been altered and/or cannot be shown. All data on the following screens was randomly generated.
Merging the interests of business and people
I worked at Ford for three total years on internal tools & systems UX
Between the Site Reliability Engineering and Cloud Engineering cross functional teams, I helped deliver enterprise wide improvements that helped scale the impact of API health alerting tools, API metrics, and an in-vehicle and accessory based digital feature management tool.
I collaborated with multiple cross-functional teams in an agile environment.
Team makeup included:
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one other designer
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2 product managers
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6 engineers
We ideated early concepts, facilitated design workshops, presented regularly to leadership, and delivered assets for production.
Redesigning a Legacy System Tool
The Problem
Early on we identified that most users struggled to understand the terminology used in the existing site. It quickly became apparent that this would be an opportunity to refactor our database to more accurately reflect it's functions.
I led discussions to bring my team members into conversations about these decisions, ran UX interviews and included the engineers and PMs in the interviews as well as the affinity diagramming and synthesis sessions.
The Solution
By doing deep research on the terminology the site used through card sorting, interviews, surveys and focus groups as our primary methods - we were able to better break down terms and their impact upon modifying the status of site items.
We increased the System Usability Score by 31% from a 62 to 81. See how this is calculated here.
What I learned
- Defining clear outcomes and scope early on helped us reduce churn
- Identifying our learning goals was crucial to discovery, once we did so and gathered our foundational research, we were then able to define performance goals
- Recognizing and confronting the challenge of an ill-structured problem: there is no right or wrong answer, just better or worse solutions
- Framing customer and business needs or pain points as opportunities to improve the Ford employee experience helped create a shared understanding of our mission
- Conducting small research activities throughout the process in pursuit of a desired outcome allowed us to continuously challenge our assumptions
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