Design Gallery: Optimizely Personalization

In October of 2015, Optimizely launched its newest product, Personalization. The design process led us down many paths that ultimately weren’t taken. We decided to revisit all of those lost ideas by creating a gallery space for the company to walk through that displayed the various sketches, mockups, prototypes, and visual design ideas we explored. This was a great way to educate the company about the design process, and for the development team to look back at all the work that went into the final product.

The finished gallery before it officially “opened.”

We decided to use the gallery format because it’s physical, which immediately communicates the breadth of ideas through the actual space it inhabits. No reading or critical thought required. And unlike an email or wiki article, which quickly gets buried in a person’s inbox, skimmed, or ignored, a gallery draws people in, is memorable, and is fun.

Now open: The Personalization Retrospective Gallery

The opening section, which explains how we started defining the problem with a Story Map and our empathy hero, Fred (a proto-persona)

The second section presents the exploratory phase. It displays a sample of mockups we used in research sessions. We set up a fake “Design Crit” board that visitors could add Post-Its to as a way of simulating critiques, which were critical throughout the design process.

The third section is all about interactive prototypes. We printed a few static screenshots, but the focus of this section is an actual interactive prototype that visitors can use. The prototype was close to the final product in functionality, user flows, and overall layout, but the visual design wasn’t set yet.

The final section shows the polish we put into the visual design before launching Personalization.

The Personalization Design Gallery on opening night.

Personalization’s lead designer, Zach, talking to visitors about the design process.

The show garnered a lot of positive feedback from coworkers about how interesting it was to see how the final product evolved out of a vague concept. And members of the development team enjoyed looking back at all the forgotten ideas that “could have been.”

Compared to an internal wiki article, email, or blog post, the gallery format is a much more engaging way to show all the thought that goes into designing a product.