Continuous Discovery Process

DEVELOPMENT AND ADOPTION

Background

Elanco is a global leader in animal health dedicated to delivering innovative products and services that prevent and treat diseases in pets and farm animals. After Elanco's merger with Bayer Animal Health, the solution operations team needed a discovery framework to enable usability and user research in order to overhaul the 400 websites and products under Elanco's portfolio.

The discovery framework I built is a part of a company-wide inititative in engineering automation, process improvement, and rapid development to support the enterprise portfolio products.

The process is inspired by continuous product discovery processes that include problem and solution spaces, consisting of activities like user interviews, stakeholder management (RACI), stakeholder interviews, user journey, service mapping, qualitative + quantitative research, UX and UI design.

The discovery framework is designed to be a replicable process, meant to guide highly collaborative and remote teams.

My Role

Senior UX Designer

Team

Solution Operations
UX Design & Research
Business Relationship Management
Enterprise & Application Engineering

Tools

Figma, Miro, Microsoft 365, Github

Timeline

September 2022 - July 2023

Outcome

I successfully established UX research and design processes. As a team, we completed two discovery projects using this framework. As the UX lead, I personally completed a standalone discovery project focusing on a strategy to implement a design, prototype, develop and test workflow. In addition to building a foundational component library and design system integrated into Figma.

Discovery 1

Determine the primary user for the Hive, a dashboard that tracks cloud-spend. The current dashboard was built by the enterprise app engineers without determining the primary user of the system. The goal for this initial discovery is to determine the ideal user, create a persona, supported by secondary and tertiary personas. In addition to definining the needs, pain-points, and resources that the primary persona needs.

Output

Identify Primary & Secondary Personas
User Needs Statments

Discovery 2

Get a general sense of design and UX concerns in terms of what's in place with the current Elanco Flexible Web Toolkit and conduct a component library audit to determine gaps. Understand what it would take to have an ideal workflow for a design, protoype, develop and test workflow with Figma integration.

Output

Foundational Design System in Figma
Strategy: Roadmap, Governance Model, Collaboration & Communication, Measurement & Feedback
Governance: Design System Owner, Design System Team, Approval Process and Maintenance Process

Discovery 3

Understand the customer experience, business process, and technology changes to determine the requirements to enable self-service onboarding with Elanco Knowledge Systems for Uplook customers in the Beef and Dairy segments.

Output

Service Map
Uplook Re-Design

Discovery Process

DISCOVERY 1

Identifying the Primary Persona

HoneyBee, a potential solution to track cost and spending in Azure and Google Cloud cost across the portfolio.

Zero discovery on who the primary user is, has a scattered view of pain-points without understanding user needs, goals, motivations, internal and external factors that a user might encounter.

Discovery Activities

Stakeholder Mapping
Stakeholder Interviews
Interview Analysis
Identify Themes + Code
Affinity Mapping
Persona and Scenarios
User Needs Statements

Process & Primary Persona

DISCOVERY 2

Component Library + Foundational Design System

Get a general sense of design and UX concerns in terms of what's in place with the current Elanco Flexible Web Toolkit and conduct a component library audit to determine gaps. Understand what it would take to have an ideal workflow for a design, protoype, develop and test workflow with Figma integration.

Discovery Activities

Stakeholder Management
Analyze component library and flexible web toolkit.
Establish the design, prototype, develop and test workflow with Figma Integration.
Document foundational component library in Figma.

✅ Figma File

Elanco Brand + Colors
TailwindCSS Colors
Heroicons
Buttons + States
Input Fields
Alerts
Type Scale
Spacing, Shadows & Border Radius
Responsive Breakpoints
Components
Navigation
Cards
Pagination
Tabs
Tables

✅ Design System Owner

Lead Product Designer
Solution Operations Discovery

✅ Design System Team

Product Design Lead
Visual Design
Front-End Engineering
Solution Operations Engineer

✅ Collaboration & Communication

Defined ways of working between product, design and engineering teams.

DISCOVERY 3

Re-Design Uplook, a small to large scale feedyard management app.

I redesigned Uplook platform for dairy operators, to enhance its functionality and user experience. Uplook is a part of EKS or Elanco Knowledge Systems, a suite of B2B solutions. The updated platform now provides a more intuitive interface for tracking herd records, milk shipments, feed, utilities, water, and fuel data.

Leveraging data from the USDA Climate Hub and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Uplook’s calculations for measuring carbon footprint and total emissions by cattle type and operation are now more accessible and user-friendly.

I also improved the estimation of operational emissions from purchased feed from Elanco, enabling cattle feeders to better articulate their sustainability efforts and participate more easily in carbon credit monetization processes.

This redesign includes features that facilitate the unlocking of grants, government funds, and incentives.

Elanco Knowledge Systems is a dynamic suite of data-driven solutions powered by experienced veterinarians, animal health professionals, statisticians and scientists where customers can chose from a number of propriety tools that aid in the operation and management of swine, dairy, and cattle feedyards.

Uplook Re-Design

Using Tailwind CSS and Tailwind UI to ensure a responsive and consistent experience across mobile, tablet, and desktop devices.