This was an interesting project that has a happy ending. The team I'm on at DISH was originally on the business side of the house. I had great working relationships with my business partners, but lacked that with my developer counterparts. This turned into a very humbling experience after seeing original builds of the app, not looking anything close to the designs I had put together. To make matters worse, this ended up being presented to our CEO / COO of the company and needless to say, did not go over well.
Flash forward to my team being moved to the IT department. I now have direct working access with the development team. I had set up regular design/dev pairings to work through our issues and we've improved the app from 2.6 stars in the app stores to about 4.7. Major success!
This was accomplished by regularly taking feedback from our customers through our feedback form in the app and working with developers to fix known issues.
When new features were added and sections of the docked navigation became bloated, we did card sorting and tree testing to determine the best navigation.
After two years of launching, I had redesigned the entire app to stay fresh and fix other flows that were clunky. It was the beginning stages of the design patterns that would end up being used in the enterprise design system that I'm helping create.
Unfortunately, the redesign project ballooned in scope (developers wanted to rearchitect the infrastructure) and after about 6 months it ended up being killed.
All in all, still has been an incredibly rewarding project as it was my first native app, designed for both Android and iOS.
I'm not letting elements die from the redesign project. When we launch our new sign in experience there will be patterns from our design system. Huzzah!
The Process
Designer
May 2016 — Present
