What's this about?

I joined Tricentis as one of two founding UX designers, leading the transformation of Tosca, the world's leading software testing suite, into a self-service product:

  • I established user research as part of the product process
  • I created a new design system uniting vastly different teams and product areas
  • As we grew, we reimagined the product as an intuitive, yet familiar web-based offering

Challenges

High Complexity

Two decades of development without any UX effort made the product hard to understand, even for the most seasoned of experts.

Resource constraints

We had more than 25 development teams to take care of, spread across the whole globe, each of which working on a tight deadlines.

Limited Designspace

Our teams were mostly focused on backend development, with our frontend efforts mostly built with WinForms

Strategy

A voice for the user

We worked to build a more user-centric culture by bringing user research into product decisions and grounding them in real customer needs.

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Building Trust

We wanted to increase awareness of our team's role among stakeholders. Showing our value would build trust and a sense of utility.

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One source to rule...

Setting up a Design System would both ensure consistency across the product suite and make development of new interfaces less demanding.

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A voice for the user

Regular Interviews

In an effort to bring the users perspective in, we ran regular customer interviews that revealed key insights. This was especially valuable during the Service Virtualisation redesign, where users highlighted the missing dashboard overview as a major pain point.

Usability Tests

One of my main projects was redesigning our mobile testing framework, which struggled with adoption. User tests for a new UI identification feature showed that participants were struggling with the early concepts, since the workflow was lacking feedforward of the steps. I used that feedback to create a more concise user flow in the final prototype.

Internal A/B Tests

During the design of our cloud testing feature, we needed clearer ways to show the states of the remote machines. We tested new icon sets with participants, then ran an internal A/B test to identify the clearest version

Customer surveys

We used our annual conference to gather customer feedback and inform our strategy. We prepared multiple surveys, and invited attendees to add their biggest frustration to an interactive word cloud on display. This helped us spot the main pain points quickly.

Building Trust

Consulting Product

Our product management started with the impression that our primary responsibility is to provide them with UI mockups. Consulting them in the earlier product stages helped us to build more trust and demand for less mature artifacts like flow diagrams and wireframes.

Sometimes I just need quick consultation, but you immediately jump into full blown out solutions...

You guys don't sit with us in the same room, which makes it very difficult to iterate and exchange

Having a UX department is nice and all, but now that we involve you directly, we need more of you

Gosh, those UX'ers

Working with product management was challenging at first. Since the UX department was new, there was plenty of friction around when and how to involve us. I led deep listening sessions with key stakeholders that uncovered pain points and ways to improve collaboration.

Design + Dev Sessions

Early on, developers found it hard to keep implementation close to the concept, and sometimes technical limits made that impossible. Closer collaboration helped them understand key design details and choose the best compromise between concept and feasibility, especially during the reskin of the product.

One source to rule...

Consistency is king

The product was full of inconsistencies: teams built components their own way, and legacy UI often clashed with newer work. A design system gave the suite a more consistent look and gave us more creative headroom to build complex interfaces.

The result

Growing our Team

Over time, our results gradually convinced stakeholders. As demand grew, so did pressure on management to expand the UX team. By the time I left, the team had doubled in size.

Redesign of Tosca

As stakeholder buy-in increased, we joined product planning at earlier stages. When management moved parts of the suite to the cloud, we were trusted to redesign those areas with modern web technologies and define the vision for a next gen Tosca

During my time as a Product Owner at Tricentis, Michal's contributions to Tricentis significantly improved its product's UX. He was great at coming up with elegant solutions for a B2B product that was very complex. No matter what you threw at him, he figured it out, challenged the right things, and did all of this with a smile!

Arlindo Lima
Jealous? 😐

No need to be! I got all the resources to make your project just as awesome and beyond! How about we have a short talk and exchange about your requirements?

Let's talk!

NEEEXT!!!