A voyage through the visual design process
Written by Mark Malek and Christina Rae
We are all pretty knowledgeable about user interface styling trends and the importance of keeping up with, if not, surpassing them. Visual design can communicate trust, value, and relevancy. If a product doesn’t look its part, a vital opportunity to impact users is lost.
But looking the part is hard — with hundreds of products at SAS it takes a lot of work to implement a single user interface direction, even with a killer design system. Feature requests, development head count, testing support, and timelines all contribute to whether or not visual design becomes a priority.
Furthermore, user interface trends change FAST. Visual Designers get bombarded by the yearly trend reports in our emails and social media feeds. It’s exhausting keeping up with the myriad of gorgeous custom typefaces, subtle drop shadows, and smooth micro interactions.
Now that we’ve covered the nitty gritty — let’s get to the point of this article. It’s been 5 years since SAS established an aesthetic direction for our products, and a lot has changed since then. It’s time for a user interface overhaul. Why is it important to do this? Who is involved in this adventure? How do we engage with stakeholders? How did we tackle the hard stuff?
Come along with us on the journey.
Why is it important to do this?
As an internal visual design team in research and development, it’s our job to continually gauge and monitor the market. If we’re not competing, we’re falling behind. We intentionally schedule time for reflection and analysis at least once a year. Sometimes we hold internal workshops to gather needs and wants, other times we gather our research externally. Most times, it’s a bit of both.
Something of this caliber can be hard to wrangle and navigate. It can often take years for customers to see the visual design updates we’ve made in our products. We started this user interface modernization effort in 2021 and are just now getting into implementation. This can feel overwhelming because trends change quickly — designing user interfaces that won’t feel dated by the time they get into customers’ hands is anxiety producing.
Who is involved in this adventure?
This is a challenging question. There are a lot of stakeholders involved — first and foremost, our users, then there is UX, Product Management, Development, Testers, Brand Teams, and of course us — the visual designers, as well as others I am not intentionally forgetting. So, the short answer is — everyone.
How do we engage with stakeholders?
This is the social dilemma that plagues us all — communication. We’ve learned a lot about communicating during this process. We’ll share some tips we’ve learned along the way.
ENGAGE EARLY
Before pen is put to paper, people need to know change is coming. Not knowing all the answers is okay, and not having a timeline is okay, but not telling people something is happening is not okay. For our user interface overhaul, we started engaging early with development managers. We explained how and why we wanted to modernize our user interfaces and we were honest — we didn’t know when or how they would be implemented, but we knew it was time to start the conversations. By communicating early, everyone involved felt they had a stake in the success of the project. Timelines will inevitably change, but communication builds trust, and trust is everything when trying to bring about change, especially with so many moving parts.
ENGAGE OFTEN
The design process takes time. We needed a full year to make sure we tested ideas, got feedback, and had time to iterate. During the design process we continually engaged with our stakeholders. Every time we showed mock-ups, we made sure everyone knew the details could change. We took pains to frequently explain our design process, let stakeholders know where we were in the process, and why each step of the process was important. Without this emphasis on our process, stakeholders could easily get lost in the details. Engaging often was a critical part of our journey. People want to be a part of the design process, even just to witness how creators create. Let them. Don’t be afraid to show the mess, or to let people comment on your early work — listen and stay engaged.
How did we tackle the hard stuff?
TEAMWORK MAKES THE DREAM WORK
Our manager broke us up into three teams based on the way our user interfaces are structured. One team tackled themes — components, interactions, layouts. Another team tackled illustrations — icons and graphics. And lastly, but most complicated — data visualization. Each team had a lead designer, which was key. Establishing a lead kept the work on track and gave someone ownership over the project and decision-making.
ESTABLISHING OUR WHY
Each team started by establishing the why. Why are we doing this and, as designers, where do we want to end up? Turns out we were already pretty clear on our why — enhance our customers’ experience and be the hottest products in the market.
EXAMINING OUR MARKET
We chose to start the design phase with a competitive analysis. Even though we regularly read user interface trend reports and explore new design systems, we wanted to take it a step further and really analyze the details. This deeper dive had two purposes: (1) gather insight into products our customers use, and (2) discover modern designs in the world of data analytics. It was essential to focus on products in data analytics.
UNDERSTANDING OUR USER
When it comes to visual design, it’s difficult to establish a user-centered direction while balancing subjectivity. There should be a clear line between user preference and user needs, but more often than not, that line is very blurry. To curb the subjectivity, we decided to create a forced-choice survey that also included a few open-ended questions.
The three teams met and workshopped what we specifically wanted to know from our users, then we translated those findings into survey questions. We asked users what they thought about our current interfaces, and how they wanted our interfaces to look in the future. The survey item that gave us the most insights, however, was image ranking. We included screenshots of SAS software alongside other analytics software and asked users to rank them based on visual appeal.
SURVEY RESULTS
Over 1,000 customers answered our survey — a number that made us very happy! To analyze the data, we used SAS Visual Analytics. The survey results provided us with dozens of insights. We learned that our customers thought our current products looked professional, but they would like them to be a bit more modern and clean. Additionally, our current product image ranked first or second on the scale of visual appeal. This felt great; it demonstrated that we only needed to improve upon what we had already established, rather than completely overhaul our designs.
WORKSHOPS, WORKSHOPS, WORKSHOPS
At this point we had our why’s, and we understood what our customers wanted to see from us. The next phase would be putting our pens to paper — the fun stuff. We decided to tackle this phase with design sprints and workshops. Each team gave design tasks to different designers and then got together in a workshop format to critique the work.
TESTING
After many design sprints, our team landed on a solid visual direction for our products. Our final step was to create a Figma beta library and ask the larger UX team to test it out. After discussing their findings, we were able to highlight places of improvement, and in turn, created an even better visual direction than we had initially imagined!
How did it turn out?
We didn’t set out to create award-winning visual design. We didn’t capitalize on sexy animations for social media trend reports. Turns out we created something much more rewarding. We created an environment that fostered a new shared vision of what our SAS products will look like. Engaging with stakeholders, sharing the process, and establishing trust were steps along our journey, and we’re certain we landed right where we needed to be.
Alongside our work, we have grown as a team through this challenging opportunity. Of course, it felt bigger than any one of us alone could tackle, but together, with each of us holding a piece, we’ve made sure that we can deliver the best experience possible, and we’ve done it proudly.
This voyage through the visual design process to re-theme a product suite at enterprise level has left us reflecting on where we were as a team at the start of the project — a little hesitant, a little anxious, a little reserved. Ask us how we feel about approaching a project like this again and we’ll probably have a different answer. After adapting to what this work called for… slowly allowing ourselves to release control, trusting the process, opening ourselves up to a variety of outcomes, it became exciting, vibrant, and rewarding.
What can sometimes feel like chaos might surprise you when you get to the other side.
Opinions are our own.
👏 ❤Tell us about your voyage! ❤👏
If you connected with this article, we have a few others you may like:
