Improving an internal platform process to speed up the workflow for our risk engineering team.
Archipelago is a platform where commercial real estate companies can store their property data digitally instead of relying on physical documents and spreadsheets. The platform is used not only by our customers, but also by internal teams.
Archipelago’s main internal use case is by our Risk Engineering Team. RET is a highly skilled team of structural engineers with expertise in the field of architecture and commercial real estate construction. This team is a vital component of Archipelago’s business, and their work is essential to bringing clients' property data from offline to online.
They’re a small team of PhDs and the success of the company hinges on their expertise and the work they produce— their time and workflow is extremely valuable.
RET is responsible for a process that verifies the data customers have on platform by linking it to documents that back the info up. This process gives customer data credibility, and RET's work is critical to Archipelago's business.
Documents are uploaded to a client's portfolio, and RET can access those documents and scan them, filling in the needed "attributes" with the data they find.
The filled in information is automatically linked to the supporting document so that its credibility, or provenance, can easily be shown when clients share their property data with the market.
As is, RET could only perform this process one property at a time. However, sometimes documents related to multiple properties. Working one at a time in these scenarios slowed the team down significantly and lead to redundant, repetitive work.
Archipelago needed to expand on the design of this process to allow RET to work on projects as a group .
I interviewed three members of RET, Heidi, Duncan, and Mladen. I watched them walk through their process on Archipelago and we discussed pain points.
Based on their feedback I started to generate and sketch out ideas for wireframes.
After a couple rounds of iterations I’d come up with three options to bounce off of our Product Manager, Austin. With his knowledge of the team and handle on technical feasibility he helped me select a top option and gave some points for refinement.
In the earliest stages of design I always like to keep my ideas loose and think outside of the box. I worked with our design manager Daniel to brainstorm as many ideas as possible in Whimsical, each working on our own at first then converging to share our ideas.
After refining a user flow and wireframes, I met with several members of RET to test and validate my designs.
I led them through tasks and observed as they interacted with my lo-fi prototype. The team confirmed that this flow would work and anticipated massive time saved if implemented effectively.
“If we can pull this off, we'll save countless hours for RET.” - Rebecca Lawson, Director of Risk Engineering.
Once the spec was signed off on the final step was high fidelity designs in Figma.
At Archipelago we worked in Elastic UI’s design system. I mocked up the final designs and presented them in our team’s design critique for feedback. After visual design iterations had been made, we handed off to engineering.
Select a primary property to see other properties that share documents, then select from list and create a job
Toggle between shared properties and fill out attributes according to document
Select attributes to copy across properties
Select properties to copy attributes to
View summary of changes and confirm
The final step in our design process is always design QA. I carefully critiqued what engineering had built in staging and documented feedback, from small UI tweaks to larger UX issues. We work in Shortcut to split up and tackle these fixes.
About a month after Ditto's release and adoption by RET, I presented the feature at our company all-hands meeting along with Austin and Colin, our Data Scientist. We demoed the featured and shared the metrics we had collected.
We were already seeing significant time savings per job by RET, and it also gave them some sanity. Instead of mindless repetition they could breeze through group properties. The team was enthused and the company loved the feature.
