Soon after the synthesis session with my first team, I was transferred to another team that was over Author Tooling and Guides. I filled in for the Product Manager’s place because he was on his paternity leave for the rest of the summer. Just want to clap for Pluralsight real quick for treating their employees with respect. This was a really good opportunity for me because this would give me a bigger part and responsibility. I felt that I wasn’t as needed in my previous team because the PM and the Designer had everything covered and didn’t really need my help. Which is a good thing.
This last half of the internship I participated in a synthesis session for author tooling, created a prototype from the data, and conducted a few CPT interviews. One of my goals was to develop design skills and I got to do that here. I was not part of the interviewing the users for this research, but I helped synthesize the data and it took a full work day and a half.
We took all of the interview transcripts and we categorized user comments in to Doing, Thinking, Feeling, and Touch Points. Then we sorted and grouped the sticky notes to find trends in the the data.
Then the next day we synthesized the grouped data even further to simplify it in to a journey map.
I then digitized it. I had a lot of fun picking out the icons for each point.
The next step after this was to ask ourselves the question “How might we help the authors accomplish their goals?” The entire team came together to brainstorm how we could help the authors create guides.
With ideas and new tools that we brainstormed we made a narrative of how an author might produce a guide. From this I created a prototype and the Product Designer showed me what a design system was and my mind was blown. It made designing so much easier and faster. At this time I basically had 2 weeks left in the internship and I really wanted to finish the prototype and also do some interviews on it. The Product Designer that I was working with was crazy busy not only with our team’s work, but with other team collaborations and Pluralsight Live that was coming up in a week. He was really kind and did his best to give me feedback on my designs and helped me create a discussion guide and we scheduled some interviews.
Prototype
The author would see this view when he picks a technology topic to write about. It uses Markdown or use just like any other text editing tool. The tool shows “what you see is what you get” feature so that the authors would not need to worry about spacing and headers.
The submit button allows editors in Pluralsight to leave comments about grammar and other edits for the author to fix before publishing. This eliminates the pain point of multiple mediums of communication between editors and authors.
After 3 CPT interviews I have found that the authors did not like the side tool bar and that some of the icons were confusing; they would rather just use Markdown. They appreciated the idea of single channel communication. The next steps for me if I had more time would be to have interviewed a few more people to find common trends and iterate the design.
