Overview
Hopper
Hopper is an internal ticket tracker similar to Jira. It's goal is to provide program managers with better project forecasting and resource allocation.
The problem
PM's found it difficult to properly resource teams without the right historical data on previous workloads.
The default ticketing system was built for engineers. It was ugly, outdated and did't translate well for non-engineers who would track their work in other ways such as email, chats, docs, and slide decks.
Our Solution
Give teams a better way to organize their tasks. In turn, PM's will recieve necessary project transparency.
Our approach was to pull existing data from the default legacy system and apply a better experience with enhanced functionality.
Increase Engagement
How do we get IC's to be more organized and create tickets for their work?
Enhance Functionality
What missing from the default system to help organize team workloads?
Focus on Customization
Empower users to customize based on their own personal work style.
Discovery
Influences
We knew we wanted to create a product that had a feel similar to other google products like drive to lessen the adoption curve. We also wanted to take inspiration from 3rd party software that teams mentioned they wish they could use such as Asana. We had to make sure that we could provide a more engageing experience and visuals.
Research
The initial research focused on talking with program managers, ux designers, and researchers. We also sent out a broader survey to the larger organization to see what information we could get back. And finally there had been previous research collected on the topic of project efficiency and optimization.
Tasks & Concepts
Task Lists
Our team program manager along with the engineer had prexeisting assumptions about how this software would benefit teams. He began pulling a PRD which we needed to validate with various IC's.
Rough Ideas
After our initial knowledge transfer and validations, we began concepting ideas as a group. I then began the full design process gathering insights along the way.
- Edit or comment on tickets inline
- Add tickets to common groups or “hotlists”
- Create new tickets with defaults
- Customize my “views”
- Quickly view tasks and tickets assigned to users
Designs
Home Dashboard
As tickets can become overwhleming, we wanted to provide users with a highly customizable dashboard which could be as robust or minimal as they would like. This is a space for recent updates across all tickets along with workspaces on individual projects.
My Tickets
As tickets can become overwhleming, we wanted to provide users with a highly customizable dashboard which could be as robust or minimal as they would like. This is a space for recent updates across all tickets along with workspaces on individual projects.
Fullscreen Commenting
As tickets can become overwhleming, we wanted to provide users with a highly customizable dashboard which could be as robust or minimal as they would like. This is a space for recent updates across all tickets along with workspaces on individual projects.
Conclusions
Overall I was very happy with the project as a whole. We were able to execute on much of the proposed designs and build some momentum gaining interest from teams. However we were not able to see it all the way through as the project was cut a bit short. Toward completion of the project we recieved word that the buganizer product would also recieve a revamp and I was then assigned a new team.
Before & After
There was a clear improvement in visual design. In terms of functionality and ux, we determined that providing more open experiences focused on customization was the right path.
