CDW
Turning user insight into new value.
Project —
Account Dashboard
Activities —
Product Design
User Research
Product Strategy
Background
CDW has been the primary retailer serving IT professionals for decades. At IA Collaborative, I was on an embedded team supporting the Asset Hub, a new platform helping IT professionals track IT investments, view historical spending, and renew software subscriptions.
As a consulting partner, my team advised CDW on generative user research and using insights to design and ship new features.
Acting on Ambiguous Insights
Asset Hub was continually informed by direct conversations with users. These interviews had users reflect on their current experiences and hopes for future features.
However, these conversations did not always yield ready-to-ship features. An insight that required interpretation was for Asset Hub to “reflect reality.”
Collaborating on New Concepts
In a workshop, we invited product managers and designers to interpret our user need in the form of new feature concepts.
Everyone was encouraged to explore ideas across the feasibility spectrum. Our concepts ranged from a simple archive button to new metrics that would more accurately track asset lifecycles.
Concept Testing
Instead of immediately deciding on a direction, our team prototyped the concepts with the most near-term feasibility. We uncovered UX issues and technical dependencies that made our choice easier. A simple Archive feature would be our best near-term choice.
Progress Over Perfection
As we refined Archive, prototypes uncovered more edge cases and helped to socialize our plans. Our ultimate vision was to make Archive an automatic process. However, that required updates that weren’t on the product roadmap yet.
We shipped a manual version first. This provided more immediate assistance to users, and built the case for the roadmap we needed in order to achieve our vision of an auto-archive.
Digital Ergonomics
As we fine-tuned Archive, we were also able to push incremental changes to Asset Hub. They were small details, but they added up to make Archive easier to use, and they paid dividends to the Asset Hub experience overall.
An example of our team re-ordering filters to better suit Archive workflows.
Summary
Archive was one of many features our team build to make Asset Hub a robust tool for IT professionals. This feature best exemplifies how insights, collaborative concepting, prototypes and design refinement can make a simple feature very well suited to its users.
This work was made possible by Michael Moffett, Sarah Klos, Min Ji Kim, and myself.
