Creating a Staff Experience for File Security Management From the Ground Up

After speaking with various stakeholders in our global support and accounting teams, it became clear file management and the existing case-by-case manual review of file security severely limited customer case resolution. Our global staff could not access secured files, but often needed pertinent, non-regulated documents to understand how to resolve customer issues. The new workflow needed easy task repeatability, correction and removal of classification overlaps, and secure but accessible contextual details tied to each file.

Since responsibility for file management relied on managers from different teams with no foreseeable plans for change, I conducted a UX audit of various internal staff workflows. Designs for various internal teams with high user satisfaction and easy task repeatability utilized table structures for immediate detailed and extensive visibility. Additionally, the team and I discussed the requirement that the design only allow for one person at a time to view and classify a file at a time. Therefore, it was important that there was a separate page after the general snapshot where users could sort and save their individual file selections. With all this in mind, I came up with some conceptual designs to discuss with the core team and the UX team.

After initial testing and feedback rounds with the core team, we were unfortunately hit with a major slowdown getting the backend working as desired. Since the project had already been delayed due to upper-level management changes, A/B testing and a thorough evaluation of quantifiable metrics were delayed beyond my time at Xometry. After discussion with the team and my managers, we decided to rollout a Phase 1 design in order to offset the pain points faced by staff and operational costs impacting business growth. I was able to get early feedback on my testable prototype, refine the design, and release Phase 1 thanks in huge part to my incredible team.