2019 samples
Contextual, in-product help
After 3 years of strategy, experimentation, and development, I finally got to deliver a contextual, in-product help experience to Atlassian's flagship product Jira Software.
This experience looks at a user's context to surface content that we believe is relevant to their help seeking journey. For example, if the user is looking at a board in Jira Software, the help container surfaces content related to the board. Or, if they're looking at a backlog, it surfaces content related to the backlog.
This project challenged me in all sorts of ways. It pushed me to transform the way Atlassian viewed content designers from being a value-added service to being a strategic business asset. It pushed me to help envision and direct a new content management system that delivers content as a service through a custom API. It pushed me to drive a product team to build platform components that can scale this experience to all Atlassian products. And, it pushed me to define the content standards, governance, and education to help all writers at Atlassian implement this killer experience for their customers.
I could talk endlessly about this project and the people that helped me build it. I couldn't be happier to see it in the wild and kicking goals.
Jira's next-gen projects
In Dec. 2017, my team launched what we called the "December experience" of the next generation of projects in Jira. This new experience updated the underlying data model and tech behind Atlassian's flagship project management software. The experience also updated the UI/UX of Jira products, modernizing and simplifying one of the most complex pieces of cloud software on the market. It was our MLP (minimum lovable product).
Since that time, I spent the majority of the next two years crafting compelling information experiences alongside some of the best designers in the world. In 2019, we delivered a heap of key features to Jira "next-gen" projects, and I got the chance to take my craft to a new level through early signal testing, forked messaging, onboarding and changeboarding guidance, and comprehensive documentation spanning the entire project.
I also learned about designing for product needs while building platform solutions. Since what we built was delivered to Jira Software, Jira Service Desk (now Jira Service Management), and Jira Ops (now defunct), I had to develop strategies for speaking the language of each of those customer bases, depending on where our experiences were shown.
This image show the request types settings page in Jira Service Desk. This platform experience is tailored to an IT service audience. If you know Jira, this experience combines Jira's classic (and confusing!) screen schemes, workflow schemes, issue type schemes, field configuration schemes, transition screens, and portal aliasing into a single interactive experience.
Along the way, I helped formalize our design and development processes, create tools and templates for our growing team, and onboard, coach, and get new team members excited about our next-gen mission in Sydney and Bangalore, India. 2019 was a big year for next-gen.