Dynamics 365 Natural Language Q&A
Senior Designer - 2020
Provide design leadership for a new NL Search technology.
Role . Senior Designer Team . 1 Design, 30+ Engineering, 2 PM Date . January 2019 - Current Brief Natural Language Q&A is a natural language search technology that enables Sales Managers and Sellers to ask questions in plain language to retrieve data through the Dynamics 365 Sales CRM. NL Q&A shipped to a Private Preview audience in April 2020 and required design leadership to land this milestone. |
Background
The team I am currently embedded on is a Natural Language Search team that is developing a new NL Q&A style search service for the Dynamics 365 suite. The team itself is a young team that transitioned from a Research-only structure to a Shipped Product team approximately 12 months ago.
Contraints .
This background introduces many unique qualities about the technology, processes and design work that I am undertaking in this position.
This background introduces many unique qualities about the technology, processes and design work that I am undertaking in this position.
- Imminent, and short Preview period (April 1 -July 1 preview)
- Limited front end development resources
- Subject to extensive "release train" delays between development completion and ship
- As a service, the product is reliant on other teams to ship
- Technology is still in development
- Processes in the team maturing over time
- Limited PM resources meant that I needed to step in to conduct Product Management activities
Goals .
- Scope and Design UX updates to ship in the 2 month Preview window
- Collect customer feedback during the Preview program
- Scope and define strategy for integrations into Dynamics suite
- Establish UX roadmap
Role and Responsibilities
UX Design and Creative Strategy
- Research UX, Technology and customer requirements
- Conduct team brainstorms
- Produce wireframes and final designs for Web-based NL Search
- Collaborate with engineers to execute designs
- Manage relationships and dependencies with partner teams
- Manage relationship, communicate with and present to Product Leadership
- Communicate with partnered internal teams
- Communicate and conduct research with customers
- Schedule and develop test plans for User Testing
- Educate collaborating UX designers on NL Technology superpowers and limitations
- Fill in for open PM head - writing specs, facilitating meetings and establishing process
Design Process
Research
I approach every project with a research phase so that I understand the user needs and constraints of the project. When I joined the team, the Preview UX had already been finalised and was being implemented by the Front End Developers, so I had several weeks of lead time to get up to speed with the Technology, how the team fit in with the organisation at large and the research on the Sales CRM, early prototypes and Search UX in general. Search has a deep history at Microsoft, hence there were 10+ years of focused research from the Bing Design team, and newer research from the Office Search and Cortana teams.
I approach every project with a research phase so that I understand the user needs and constraints of the project. When I joined the team, the Preview UX had already been finalised and was being implemented by the Front End Developers, so I had several weeks of lead time to get up to speed with the Technology, how the team fit in with the organisation at large and the research on the Sales CRM, early prototypes and Search UX in general. Search has a deep history at Microsoft, hence there were 10+ years of focused research from the Bing Design team, and newer research from the Office Search and Cortana teams.
Design Activities
With the product already on the pathway to shipping, once I was familiar with the space, I isolated a number of workstreams I could contribute to while the product leadership established a roadmap for the product in the next 12 months.
This included:
With the product already on the pathway to shipping, once I was familiar with the space, I isolated a number of workstreams I could contribute to while the product leadership established a roadmap for the product in the next 12 months.
This included:
- UX initiatives to mitigate technical limitations
- Loading UX for the Q&A Instant Answer Card (Ships June)
- Establish schema for presentation of tabled Q&A Answers (Ships June)
- Customer Pipeline and Processes
- Creative strategy on integrations into Dynamics:
- Dynamics 365 Marketing App (Previews in October 2020)
- Dynamics Platform Search (Previews in October 2020)
- Customer Platform App (Previews in October 2020)
Q&A Answer Card Loading UX
Brief
Once deployed for initial testing, the backend team isolated an area impacting the UX that required longer term development. The service that was fetching the answer from the backend database was sometimes taking 10+ seconds to return a result to the UX. The team had never scoped a "loading" experience, so the user would not have any indication that a result was incoming until the instant answer card loaded late into the total search result list.
Execution
When I identified this issue with the team, we quickly prioritised resources to fix the issue so that an update could ship shortly after and kicked off the required processes to execute/
Brief
Once deployed for initial testing, the backend team isolated an area impacting the UX that required longer term development. The service that was fetching the answer from the backend database was sometimes taking 10+ seconds to return a result to the UX. The team had never scoped a "loading" experience, so the user would not have any indication that a result was incoming until the instant answer card loaded late into the total search result list.
Execution
When I identified this issue with the team, we quickly prioritised resources to fix the issue so that an update could ship shortly after and kicked off the required processes to execute/
- Draft a lightweight spec
Without any PM resources, and wanting to ensure that the UX delivered solved the issue, I drafted a spec outlining the engineering and UX issue, MVP for shipping and hypothesis on solution and metrics for success. - Align with core UX council on design patterns
I connected with the UX guideline council to ensure alignment with existing patterns. - Design UX
Working in Figma, I developed the Design of the Loading UX, reviewing with stakeholders throughout to gather and integrate feedback at a rapid pace. - Brief engineering team to commence integration
Once the design prototype was accepted, I briefed the engineering team and provided redlines. - Validate design and sign off for ship
Once engineering completed, I organised a review to provide feedback and sign off on the feature.
Customer Pipeline and Processes
One of the first areas I identified that I could bring my experience to was creating a process for guiding our Preview customers and capturing their feedback throughout the Preview period. Establishing this process was critical to ensuring that feedback about the Preview UX could be collected, synthesised and used to benefit further development. Partnered closely with PM while there was PM resources on this workstream to achieve;
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Next Steps
Natural Language Q&A is currently in Preview with a private audience of customers. This preview concludes on July 1, when all feedback will be collected and synthesised by the PM team and myself to determine next steps for the product. We are also currently iterating on the following workstreams:
Creative strategy on integrations into Dynamics:
Creative strategy on integrations into Dynamics:
- Dynamics 365 Marketing App (Previews in October 2020)
- Dynamics Platform Search (Previews in October 2020)
- Customer Platform App (Previews in October 2020)