Cerifi
My role:
I performed as a Ux lead. I worked together with the Cerifi Product team: The product manager, The product owner and the BAs. I am in charge of receiving product requirements, analyzing them, understanding them and prioritizing them.
Then, I communicate these requirements to my design team and I organize their sprint tasks based on our capacity. In my design team, I am in charge of carrying out a strict quality control of the designs, I verify that the work flows well and I solve any type of blocker as well. I love to motivate my designers and enhance all their skills when I assign them tasks.
After the designs are finished, I present them to the client to receive their feedback and I also do validations with the technical team, because this project has great challenges and restrictions in the back and front-end. So I am a bridge between development and design and my responsibility is to validate that everything we design can be implemented.
In the end and to summarize, I would say that My role is cross between the client, the product team, the design team and the development team.
The Approach:
Cerifi offers financial education programs. The overall vision of this platform is to be a one-stop shop for those individuals who are in their career paths in the financial securities world. When you work in that financial and security world, you have to get certifications and the more certifications you get, more different positions you can hold. Past Perfect takes care of preparing people to pass their securities licensing exams.
This project started with a discovery and our goal was to understand the needs of the client and the product. I performed a Ux audit that included an evaluation of a product's usability, learnability, and accessibility characteristics.
Get down to work:
There were a lot of things that we detected in the discovery phase. First, that Cerifi worked with a previous provider who did a poor job for them and since they were looking to launch the platform in a few months, they were looking for transparency and honesty in the estimations of work in all areas. Secondly, that the platform did not meet the minimum accessibility criteria and, finally, that the technical complexity of the project was very high (more than we imagined) due to the large companies to which they provide services.
This platform just had some old reference mockups and some front-end stuff to reuse. We should launch the platform quickly. So we started building the Figma mockups, making improvements to colors, sizes, components, etc. in order to meet accessibility criteria, we built all user flows and we made a basic UI kit to create consistency across the platform. We also designed the entire tablet version that didn't exist. And along the way we were improving small flows in which we saw opportunities.
The Challenges:
Wow where to start... This has been the most challenging client I've ever had and I'll tell you why. Not only do they offer the platform for students, but they offer platforms for administrators and instructors, and on top of that, there is a super administrator who must have access to absolutely everything. This is where we start talking about roles and permissions and things get very complex.There are too many use cases within the platform, and there are many things to consider. The client seeks to launch features to the market in a very short time, and the team that started with 4 people in a discovery, evolved very quickly and in 6 months we are a team of 60 people. Teams are divided by pods and the design team services all PODS.My role is transversal and has a lot to do with management and conflict resolution hahaha they look for me when there are technical restrictions or when there are changes in priorities or when something takes a long time for a front-end to implement.
In conclusion, it is a project that goes a thousand miles an hour and you have to pay close attention to details and the good communication between teams is essential.
Admin Profile example
Learner Profile example
Super-admin Profile
Accesibility approach:
Since Certification is an educational platform, accessibility is a key point. Web accessibility aims to reduce existing barriers on the Internet to make web pages accessible and usable by as many people as possible, regardless of their limitations.If we want to reach all users we must create accessible platforms, with Cerifi we were committed to reaching an A level of accessibility. It was interesting to understand the criteria and to really know that accessibility does not only involve the design but also front in the code and the content creators who must also create accessible content. We went through each element and we delivered an accesibility deck for Cerifi reporting how accessibility was addressed so that they could see how the team complied, in this there were small examples of each feature and additionally we explained the design and the front-end tools that we used to validate that every screen is accessible.
Upcoming New Pods to support:
In recent months the business saw the need to take into account the authors of the content of the courses, so it is another project of the account, which we are attending, here I have conducted some interviews and tests with the content creators to understand their pain points and create tasks to improve the characteristics of the tool with which they create content.
Learnings
· You should always check the designs between the different areas such as: back - end, front end and product: Many times the designs are very well created and thought out but there are technical restrictions that do not allow them to be implemented.
· The technical point of view gives us a very important input to think about designs that are scalable in the long term or to find solutions that are good and do not take such long implementation times.
· You can always negotiate, sometimes we love a design but for a developer to do it is complex, so we must be flexible. Sometimes they help us and sometimes we help them.· Communication is always important in all type of relationships hahaha, especially in work relationships, every decision must always be communicated, if there are questions, they must be discussed as soon as possible, and we must be aware of everything that happens in the project to avoid mistakes.
· Organization: Long flows are sometimes very complex, but if your files are well organized, the whole team will be able to understand them and you will save everyone a lot of time.
· Team-working: In such large teams and projects, teamwork is essential. Having a good attitude with everyone, listening, and providing help whenever required, is something that helps a lot.
· Patience: Customers change requirements or priorities quickly and we must understand and help them. Sometimes there is also time pressure, but we always have to stay calm and work things out little by little.· Look at the big picture: As a leader I have learned that seeing the big picture is something very important, because I think about long-term solutions and I am also always focused on understanding where the business is going at a high level, and I make decisions based on that, Sometimes we lose focus on the day to day and we only focus on the present and forget the rest.· Accesibility is not a privilege it is a right.Hahaha I think you never finish learning, but that's the interesting thing about projects that challenge you, that leave you with a lot of learning as a professional and as a person. Each project always leaves many teachings and this has been the one with which I have been most grateful.