Enterprise Experiences – Cheryl Platz

Microsoft Teams Enablement

Enterprise Experiences, Leadership, Research, Service Design

The Teams Enablement project at the Gates Foundation was a yearlong effort to support the deployment of Teams to the foundation in a manner that minimized disruption and maximized employee success, launched over a year early in response to the findings from my earlier Employee Experience discovery project. I (and eventually, a Senior vendor designer on my team) embedded on the Teams Enablement project for 9 months to ensure that our delivery of Teams exceeded expectations without adding to employee stress. The Teams Enablement project was a hybrid of service design, traditional usability techniques, and content strategy. My Human Centered Design…

Visitor Management System

Enterprise Experiences, Research, Touch & Tablet UI, UX and Product Design

The aging visitor management system (VMS) at the Foundation had hit end of life. Rather than just simply starting from scratch, the product team wanted to learn from the current system’s strengths and weaknesses to ensure the replacement system has parity and perhaps exceeds prior standards. However, the need to complete a requirements document for the vendor was urgent due to continuing issues with the current system. Project Team I was the sole user experience design resource on this project, and I was only allocated on a temporary basis. I engaged deeply during the discovery phase (3-4 weeks), intermittently during business requirements,…

Employee Experience 2019

Enterprise Experiences, Research, Service Design

My first challenge at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was to identify the greatest areas of potential impact for the Information Technology department to invest in with regard to employee productivity and collaboration in 2019, using human centered design and research techniques over a 6 month period. By the end of this period, the work encompassed: 29 1:1 interviews Multiple observation sessions: job shadows, meeting observation sessions, IT Office Hours, etc.Direct experiences as a new employeeParticipatory journey mapping sessions with stakeholdersDiary studies and surveys Project Team I was the sole design and research resource on this project; I conducted…

Dynamics 365 settings IA: Power platform admin center

Cloud Services, Enterprise Experiences, Information Architecture, Leadership, UX and Product Design

As part of my role as the Design Lead for the launch of Microsoft's ambitious Power platform admin center, I took on several complex individual contributor projects. The largest of these projects was the migration of Dynamics app settings from the Dynamics 365 app on a legacy web client to the new Power platform admin center site, using a new information architecture and a new UI stack. Further complicating the assignment was the timeline presented for the work. Originally, the team had planned on migrating the old settings pages directly to the Dynamics UI stack, the Unified Client. This original…

Design leadership: Power platform admin center

Cloud Services, Enterprise Experiences, Leadership, Management, UX and Product Design

On November 1, 2017, I took on a new role at Microsoft as the Design Lead for a new and ambitious cross-product initiative, which 10 months later was released as the Power platform admin center. Read more about the site in Microsoft's words at the official press release. Problem Statement Unify four different admin centers - Dynamics 365 instance administration, Dynamics 365 app administration, admin.powerapps.com, and admin.flow.com - into a single experience on a new UI framework. 10 months later, the site moved out of private preview and into public release. The Team MY ROLE: Principal Designer and Design Lead…

Azure Marketplace Gallery Filter

E-commerce, Enterprise Experiences, Information Architecture, Leadership, UX and Product Design

When we launched the new Azure Marketplace in January of 2017, we initially adopted the category control from AppSource.com, both for consistency and expediency on our tight timeline. After launch, however, customer feedback via verbatims and quantitative data began to suggest that our customers had a problem with wayfinding. The issue largely stemmed from the difference in information architecture between the sites. AppSource categories correspond to products and were more rigidly hierarchical, while Azure Marketplace categories had overlap and a less rigid hierarchy. I proposed to the team that we begin an exploration of alternate filtering models, and the team…

Azure Partner UX Guidelines

Cloud Services, Enterprise Experiences, Information Architecture, Leadership, UX and Product Design

When I returned to Microsoft in August 2016, I joined as the Design Lead for the Azure Framework. Our team of 4 full-time designers, 2 researchers, and a content writer - along with our studio head, who worked closely with us - were responsible for improving the user experience of the entire Azure platform in two primary ways. Our first role was to work directly with developers on key features or controls. Our second role was a broader, less direct influence over the rest of the 70+ partner teams we could not work with directly. Upon joining, I immediately saw…

Marketplace Landing Pages

E-commerce, Enterprise Experiences, UX and Product Design

In early 2017, analysis of the AppSource.com telemetry revealed a potentially significant problem with the landing experience on AppSource.com, which was launched prior to my time partnering with the team. In partnership with our marketing and merchandising product managers, I worked to help both the AppSource and Azure Marketplace teams develop a roadmap for improving the landing experience. Problem Statement Since both AppSource.com and Azure Marketplace are driven by the same underlying marketplace framework, problems from both sites are indicated below. Customer satisfaction as measured from the home page on AppSource.com was extremely low Azure Marketplace lacked a home page,…

Azure Marketplace 2.0

Cloud Services, E-commerce, Enterprise Experiences, UX and Product Design

In the fall of 2016, my responsibilities as the Azure Framework Design Lead expanded to include direct responsibility for our pro developer marketplaces. When we began, the only active marketplace in our purview was AppSource.com, but there was an immediate need to take the lessons learned on AppSource and apply them to a completely new approach to the existing Azure Marketplace. Role and Team For the 2.0 version of the Azure Marketplace, I was the sole designer, working with 3-4 program manager partners and several UI developers on a daily basis. In addition, I partnered with our team's content designer…

SCCM 2012: Information Architecture

Enterprise Experiences, Information Architecture, UX and Product Design

My time on System Center Configuration Manager 2012 spanned four years of design and hundreds of UI surfaces. Perhaps our most important task was redefining the information architecture of the product - and to do so, we had to drive years of detailed user research and iterative design experimentation. Problem Statement SCCM 2007 was largely produced without UX consultation until the endgame. As a result, the product’s IA was a single, massive tree that represented every object type - and every individual object - in one long branched list. For large companies, expanding the wrong node could grind the whole…