Designing an Internal Survey Management Tool

One of my favorite projects to date has been leading the user research and design for an internal survey management tool at a market research firm. The teams there were working across several different systems, which put a dent in their productivity and made it hard to execute projects well.

What made this one special was how much of the process happened away from the screen. I started by shadowing teams from each department to learn how they actually serviced customers and fulfilled orders, which is almost never how the documentation says they do. I interviewed team members about their pain points, built personas, and mapped out a workflow diagram showing how often people were bouncing between applications and each other.

Only after all of that did the design work start. I aligned with stakeholders on goals, worked side by side with the Operations team to imagine what a new application could do, and we ranked every need to settle on an MVP. Wireframes came next, then a functioning prototype, then several rounds of feedback before the UX settled.

The lesson I keep taking away from projects like this: the quality of the solution is set long before anyone opens a design tool. It’s set by how well you understand the problem.

The full case study is on the project page.