DESIGNING FROM SCRATCH
Imperium Dashboard
Product Design
THE OVERVIEW
Redefining the
Imperium Experience
Imperium is Walmart's rule management platform initially created to help with the growth of Walmart.com and to enable the Trust and Safety team as a business policy manager. With the increasing number of users across all of Walmart, I was tasked with identifying and improving the overall experience of Imperium as the number of users continue to grow exponentially.
Team
Jeff Lim
S.A (PM)
A.M. (UI Dev)
S.M. (Dev)
Duration
3 Months
Tools
Sketch / Figma
Balsamiq
InVision
Zeplin
Snapshot of the Old Imperium
THE RESEARCH
Talking With Users
I started off by talking to the various people using our platform and conducted user interviews with the goal of understanding pain points and introducing Imperium's renewed focus on user experience.
I talked with 16 people who consisted of Product Managers (6), Software Engineers (7) and Category Specialists (3) and created two personas for our team to reference when moving forward with features.
I also took a look at our slack support channel (#imperium-support) to see what type of help users needed from our team. I managed to organize the info and found the following pain points.
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80% of asks were related to setting up a domain or getting specific users access
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A lot of the answer to the questions were readily available online
THE CHALLENGE
Need vs. Want
After talking with the users and the Imperium team, I felt like a few foundational items such as rule creation/editing needed to be addressed along with user access management. With pressure from above to create a "new" feature, I strategized with the PM to create a dashboard to address some of these underlying issues, prioritizing the needs of our users and the operational efficiency of our team.
GOAL: To create a dashboard that would provide value to all users, but also address foundational issues discovered during user research.
THE DISCOVERY
Multiple Issues
All Users:
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Domain creation/access requests are completely manual via slack (#imperium-support)
Rule Managers:
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For the most part, only care about their own rules and would like an experience tailored towards individual rule management (general interview)
Domain Managers:
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Hard to keep track of and navigate multiple domains (task-oriented interview)
Task-oriented Interview
Semi-Structured Interview
THE DESIGNS
Initial Wireframes
Domain Overview Widget
1. Request a New Domain / 2. Get Access to Existing Domain
3. Navigate / Domain Status
4. Domain Management / Settings
Domain Access Widget
The Access widget continues to solve the issue of the Product team having to manually grant access to individual users and allows an easy way for Domain Managers to get this done instantly.
1. Access Requests and Confirmations through email
2. Collected Info for Granting User Access
3. Dealing With Multiple Requests
Domain Configuration Widget
Aiding Domain Managers during setup and reflecting progress / status.
Rules Overview Widget
Probably the most important for Rule Managers, this widget allows shortcuts to interactions around specific rules as well as customization to individual users.
1. Directly Access Rules Based on Status (E.g. Active, Submitted, Draft)
2. Shortcuts into Creating/Testing Rules
3. Separating Out My Rules vs. All Rules
Performance and Sweep Widget
The Performance widget was included to allow Domain Managers the ability assess the health of their domain.
The Sweep widget was included to allow Rule Managers to check the status of their rules and identify the number of successfully run sweeps over time.
THE FEEDBACK
Tweaks and Changes
Approved: Domain Overview, Domain Access, Rules Overview
Needs Work: Domain Config, Performance
Parking Lot: Sweeps
THE UI
Combining Styles
Since we were bringing a dashboard to Imperium the team thought it would be a great idea to give the platform some UI upgrades. The stakeholders wanted to make sure that Imperium felt similar to its sibling platforms and have a unified Walmart look and field.
UX + UI
Combining the styles of Walmart.com and iSAM (Sister platform) resulted in the Imperium Dashboard
The Domain Overview Widget stayed the same throughout the iterations allowing users to both navigate to specific domains (Rule Managers) and make any changes to the configurations (Domain Managers).
The Access Widget received the most support because it helped All users take control of user management, but it also removed the burden from the Imperium team.
The Rules Overview Widget underwent some slight changes. The ability to Create/Test rules was removed for the time being while POCs are being done to optimize page load time.
I suggested the Quick Links widget in order to provide a better method of navigating to specific domains and carrying out several functions. It also provides which actions are available in a particular domain.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Navigation and Help
Running parallel to designing the dashboard I also revamped the navigation and Help Center. Here are the results...
I worked with some devs and reorganized how our information is displayed and created an entire resource for getting help on Imperium.
A Small sneak peek of how you can view helpful info on all features, proper use of the slackbot and check out the history of Imperium.
NEXT STEPS
Tackling the Details
Now that the foundations are set, it's time to start looking at individual features (e.g. rule authoring) and outstanding UI elements (e.g. Data tables). In addition, I'm going to revisit the Performance and Domain Config widgets and do some more research to see how I can improve those experiences.
OTHER CASE STUDIES
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