ZenBusiness - Product Design - North Star

Project Overview

Goal -

As the lead product designer for the core experience group, we would periodically run (every few quarters) a North Star exercise to show, primarily to the c-suite and ZenBusiness investors, the product design groups vision for the potential future of the dashboard. In parallel, these concepts would drive our own design efforts in reaching the idealized dashboard experience for our customers.

Project Responsibilities

Design lead for the core experience portfolio.

Primary ask -

• Work collaboratively with the VP of Product, Director of Product, Senior Manager for Product in strategizing and conceptually designing new North Star concepts to be shared and communicated with c-suite executives.

• Communicate and share out our concept to the rest of the company and with our product design group as the North Star vision.

Opportunities

As I started to think about the North Star, I wanted to get a better sense of the holistic needs of the business and our customers and what was needed from the dashboard in order to serve those needs. In order to gain that level of understanding, I’d meet with portfolio program and product managers for each of the portfolios. Using Figjam, I’d take notes of our conversations to surface these areas of need. Much of what was heard, from a customer standpoint was anecdotal, but insightful in understanding customer need and how they intersected with the business at an operational level.

High level takeaways -

• How might we… provide quick access to a customer’s EIN number in the dashboard?

• How might we… communicate more clearly the status of a banking application?

• How might we… provide deep links into important tasks/actions?

• How might we… provide additional visibility to our products/services in the main dashboard?

• How might we… better communicate timely system and status updates?

Inspiration

In collaboration with my PM and product leadership, we would identify several mobile and responsive web experiences as sources of inspiration. Each would be examined for their approaches and how each approach enabled task fulfillment.

Exploration

I would collaborate with my partners in the core experience group and product leadership on several concepts that would attempt to solve for the needs of our customers and business. Below is one of several concepts that were shared with leadership in an attempt to solve for pain points our customers were seeing while seeking to improve on business OKRs of DAU/MAU and, perhaps more importantly, providing value to small business owners beyond the initial formation.

Designs would take an iterative approach to the North Star with careful consideration towards patterns established in our design libraries.

Supporting Screens