NEWSIE
Turning status reports into your favorite morning coffee read.
In 2020, I was the primary product designer on this FordLabs project which focused on improving the way product teams communicated out status within Ford.
How might we communicate product status in a more real-time dynamic view in order to help increase transparency within the Autonomous Vehicle division at Ford?
The Autonomous Vehicle Lead at Ford tasked our product team with creating a product to reduce the cognitive load on consumers of status updates, increase the value of status updates that product teams share with leadership team members, and increase the transparency and collaboration across product teams.
6 month FordLabs project
Discovery Research
I led the team through 25+ discovery interviews to understand consumer and producer pain points.
Consumer Pain Points
Hard to digest content and obtain full context of the status
Lack of transparency of who is looking at updates
Hard to understand priorities across several teams
Producer Pain Points
Lack of flexibility with the current format of reports
Unclear who is looking at the reports and who to tailor the content to (business vs technical)
No insight into what other teams are working on
The solution: Newsie
After running several experiments to test out different solution ideas, I used the research data as input towards designing the Newsie product.
The product went through several design iterations.
Iteration 1 - List of products and image status report
Iteration 2 - Dynamic roster of products, product profile, and ability to upload a report
Iteration 3 - Revised color palette and on-site editing experience
Iteration 4 - Tabbed profile design to combine the profile and status report pages
Measuring Success
Team and user adoption were tracked to better understand how successful the product was at simplifying access to reports – the more teams within an organization that utilized Newsie, the fewer places a consumer had to go to understand product progress
