Advanced roadmaps for Jira navigation

1. Understand

I began by conducting UX research and synthesis to uncover the root problems. This included:

• 6 user interviews to understand users' day-to-day tasks and their experiences with Advanced Roadmaps.

• Reviewing over 50 Jira tickets to extract recurring themes and pain points.

• Conducting a comprehensive audit of every component in Advanced Roadmaps, assessing common user tasks and comparing design trends across competitors like Aha, Asana, Monday.com, and Product Board. For example, I explored how filters and behaviours functioned in similar tools to identify gaps in our product.

2. Define

I collaborated with the Product Manager to group user feedback and research insights into four key themes. This focused analysis helped define the problem with our users in mind:

• Who are they? Plan owners, plan consumers, stakeholders, and new customers.

• What do they do? Scroll up and down, toggle filters, settings, and drop-down menus to locate necessary actions, often expanding the roadmap to maximise visibility.

• What are they trying to do? Set filters, adjust view settings, view roadmaps, and share their screens during meetings.

• What are the pain points? Difficulty discovering features, inability to expand the roadmap for better visibility, misaligned feature locations, and a lack of screen real estate to view their plan effectively.
  From this, we crafted a clear problem statement:
  Users of Advanced Roadmaps create a roadmap for their team but are frustrated because they cannot utilise the full real estate of their screen to view their roadmap. They also find themselves toggling back and forth between filters, settings, and drop-down menus while scrolling excessively to view their plan.

3. Sketch

Based on the defined problem, I facilitated design workshops to explore potential solutions. We brainstormed ideas to address the identified pain points, focusing on improving navigation, reducing mental load, and optimising screen space for roadmap visibility.

4. Decide

The design concepts were shared with the team for feedback on understanding any technical constraints and ensuring we weren’t designing something that couldn’t be built. The concepts were also shared with other designers in design sparring sessions (design critiques) to gather feedback on the UX and UI, ensuring that nothing was missed and that we were aligned on the design direction. The feedback process was constant throughout the entire design process, keeping the team involved at every step and ensuring we weren’t overlooking any crucial details.

I refined three concepts into working prototypes using Figma and tested each concept with 6 customers. I chose to test with 6 users per concept because, after testing with about 5 users, recurring patterns often emerge. Given the 2-week sprint to reach a design solution, this was the ideal number of users to get actionable insights without compromising design quality.

5. Prototype

I developed the prototypes based on the feedback received during the design workshops and critiques. These prototypes included simplified navigation, better alignment with user expectations, and enhanced screen space for roadmaps. They were tested with 6 different users for each concept to ensure we captured relevant insights for further refinement.

6. Test

After refining the prototypes, I moved to the prototype testing stage. We implemented the new navigation with a feature flag for a subset of customers and conducted controlled user testing on a percentage of daily active users (DAU). This testing focused on specific tasks that users perform on a daily basis to gauge how well the new navigation fit into their workflow and whether there was any disruption.

To further refine the design, we offered users the option to opt in to the new navigation. This approach allowed us to gather feedback on the new design and iterate before fully shipping it as the final feature.