🧭 Business Context
As a product design consultant for Bel Group, I worked on Magdalena, their PLM software. This tool helps Bel create, organize, and trace all their products. However, it was designed in the 2000s and hasn't been updated much.
To migrate Magdalena to Angular, Bel Group decided to use their design system, Milky, to improve the user experience. But with hundreds of daily users who are used to the current interface, changes need to be carefully considered.
The challenge was therefore as follows:
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How can we carry out a drastic redesign of Magdalena's UX/UI while ensuring that both old and new users benefit from this improvement?
👨💻 My Responsibilities In The Team
I am an experienced Product Designer within the Design Studio team, consisting of a Lead Product Designer, an external Junior Product Designer, an intern and a trainee. This team is part of the Design Thinking Factory, which also includes two UX Researchers and the Head of Design Thinking Factory.
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Supporting the migration of various modules of a key product for the production of goods at Bel: Magdalena (User Research, Restitution, Prototyping, Usability Testing, Hand-Off, Iteration) and assisting in the improvement of certain processes (User Research and Usability Testing)
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Defining and monitoring the success criteria of this project
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Preparing and leading user tests to gather insights on the new interface
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Working closely with the Product Owner and the devs team
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Acting as the right-hand person of the Lead Product Designer for the design and product management teams
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Proposing improvements to Design processes
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Co-maintaing a Design System with a team six Product Designers.
🎨 Design Proces
🔎 State of art / User research
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Product tour with PM/PO
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User interview, to observe how end users use the product, understand what works well, and what works less well
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UX audit
The goal here is to observe and understand how the product was designed and built, what purpose it serves, how end users use it, and understand what works well and what can be improved.
📝 Restitution / User journey
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Mapping of the different key steps of the product
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Identify blocking points, frustrations, and potential opportunities
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Then prioritize critical points to address.
📝 First wireframing ,mock ups, usability tests.
After mapping out the product and prioritizing the elements to tackle first, we formed a team consisting of the Product Owner, a power user, and myself to begin creating wireframes and early page mockups (Using Bel design system, Milky. We tested these mockups with other users to obtain feedback and iterate)
Usability test restitution
I led the user testing part. The chosen format was a selection of 5 tasks co-defined with the P.O, which represented the main uses of Magdalena before the redesign. Users performed these tasks on Figma prototypes. We did 6 test sessions (recorded) - one per user. I considered this number sufficient to gather most of the insights.
Once the sessions were done, I spent time analyzing the different feedback, pain points, and tagging, classifying and prioritizing them, in order to clearly identify the learnings and make them actionable for the future.
To make sure everyone had the same level of information, I created a usability test report deck that I presented during a meeting with several people (the PO, lead designer, a developer, and the power user).
The first part of this deck provides context of the project and explains the purpose of conducting usability tests (what assumptions we wanted to validate). Then, in a second part, the deck highlights what worked well and what didn't, with concrete actions items associated with each element, accompanied by user quotes to illustrate everything.
[ Quelques slides du deck extrait du deck de restitution ]
Final result
After iterating on the elements that caused the most problems, and conducting a small presentation session with the users who had reported the issues, we arrived at a result that seemed coherent and effective, which was then sent to production.
👏 Product Successes
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User satisfaction increased by 25% after the introduction of the new interface.
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Productivity in product creation and management improved by 30% after the implementation of the new design.
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The number of errors and inconsistencies in product data and information decreased by 20% after the redesign.
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The new interface resulted in a decrease of 15% in the time required to complete tasks.
🌱 What I Learned
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The importance of involving end-users in the design process to ensure that their needs and pain points are addressed.
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The value of conducting usability tests to validate assumptions and identify areas for improvement.
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The need for close collaboration between the design team, product owner, and development team to ensure a successful product redesign.