Jun - Aug 2020
(10 weeks)
User Experience Intern
Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe XD
During summer 2020, I had the wonderful experience of joining the Coca-Cola company as a User Experience intern of the NextGen Connected experience platform, the digital experience carrier of the Coca-Cola company. I was primarily working on Creating the design library for better reusability of the NextGen Components.
It was a challenging and adventurous experience that allowed me to dive deep into this complex platform, trying to make the complicated simple by bringing a lot of creativity into my work.
During summer 2020, I had the wonderful experience of joining the Coca-Cola company as a User Experience intern of the NextGen Connected experience platform, the digital experience carrier of the Coca-Cola company. I was primarily working on Creating the design library for better reusability of the NextGen Components.
It was a challenging and adventurous experience that allowed me to dive deep into this complex platform, trying to make the complicated simple by bringing a lot of creativity into my work.
I worked in pair with fellow design intern Nicole to design and generate ideas of the logo for the NextGen connected experience platform.
View SlidesIn summer 2020, I worked as UX Design Intern with the Global Marketing Technology team. As a solo designer, I Explored the component library for their global digital experience carrier called NextGen. Considering the time span of the project is less than 10 weeks, I mainly focused on conducting user research and delivering a structure level high fidelity prototype. I collaborated with engineers, project managers, and content authors to research and built the design.
- Created by Dayoung Hwang
NextGen is Coke's internal digital experience carrier responsible for supporting Coke's 500+ websites worldwide. It bases on Adobe Experience Manager, Providing an evolutional way to quickly build and modify digital assets by content designers and minimize development efforts. However, while the system (internal and components) becomes more complicated by evolving, there isn't an easy way for new employees to quickly onboard the platform. It is also challenging for experienced content authors to find existing component variances and bring a consistent visual deliverable to the system.
1. Most content authors without web development experience mentioned having difficulty understanding the platform's concepts and the design components.
2. Lack of consistency and requires repetitive efforts.
1. Internal Stakeholders (from other brands in Coke)were reluctant to use the platform without seeing what the platform was offering.
2. Taking a long time to onboard new employees.
The NextGen Wiki page and operational held onboarding sections are currently providing most of the onboarding information. However, The wiki page includes mostly pure text and hard-to-dive content. Although the onboarding sections were recorded and stored in company drive granted for easy access, the videocast's length (2 hours on average) makes users off-tracks quickly. Thus, none of the current methods provide the ideal learning experience.
One-on-one learning sections with the operation team have been the most effective way to solve most problems. However, Comparing to look at the documentation, it usually brings higher costs.
I conducted seven stakeholder interviews to discover existing pain points and needs, also define the target customer of the product.
I used competitive analysis method hopes dig deeper to understand how existing design systems work to shorten the learning curve of their users effectively. I discovered a good design of a component library should provide following opportunties:
Interactive demo always better than static images.
(GIFs work as well!)
Display with read-only access provides opportunities for inspiration with no hassle.
Provide commonly asked questions session based on the records, also boost the reusability
Search function is crucial for users targeting contents they like to learn.
Provide shorter videos and less texts to help users better digest the tutorials.
I found following key insights:
Search function is crucial for users targeting contents they like to learn.
Video tutorial shouldn't be longer than 10 mins. The text contents should be as simple as possible and weight as lesser as possible
Featuring interactive demos is an excellent method to help users understand the concepts. However, development efforts could be a lot higher than other ways.
1) The read-only showcases could be the best way to displaying live content that users can interact with.
2) Content authors could help each other by posting and answering forums.
The operational team could record common questions they received from users and update them at where their corresponding concepts locate.
The component library should serve its purpose of making components easily understandable and showcasing all existing solutions so that content authors can reuse the components. Therefore, saving front-end costs and achieving speed development of the digital experience.
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A design library supports intuitively onboarding experience, easily targeted instructions, also showcases existing solutions to ensure the reusability of the existing designs.
Even though content authors configure the same setting in the NextGen platform, the outcomes still look different as long as they are under other theme packages. Building a single page at AEM to display all kinds of design variances that each component can achieve is an impossible task. Therefore, in addition to a component library that showcases basic design variances, I recommend each authoring team build their example pages separately and voluntarily in AEM to save the costs of the project.
The example pages under AEM can only view through the read-only access to users outside the authoring team. The read-only access lets users view the page, copy components, and configure the components without saving changes.
1. Copy and paste the new generated components to the example pages and update the example page monthly or Bi-weekly.
2. Manage by different designers inside the team and rotate the duty every week/month.
Emphasizing the existing resources, I built this diagram to help stakeholders understand the whole logic behind the NextGen onboarding and design.
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To help operation teams avoid unnecessary and repeated efforts, a commonly asked question section should exist on the site, ideally in a video or screenshot format. In addition to that, content authors could meet routinely to discuss and help each other to learn in-depth about the platform.
During the short 12 weeks of my internship at Coke, I was exposed to new information and resources everyday. Some of them were contradictory to one another, and I made wrong design decisions all the time. After taking reflection of this, I decided to reach out and asked questions to uncover his underlying logic. That's the point where I started to emphasize developers' point of view and tried to make decisions that could benefit both individuals.
Working on something that I never had exposure to is quite difficult to start. The design problem isn't solely dependent on perfect settings like I used to encounter during school but a complex system. Sometimes, even though I did enough research, there were always other constraints that came up unexpectedly. Therefore, I gradually started to learn how to embrace the ambiguity of the work.
The next step of this project could begin with prioritizing the MVPs & contents by considering their impacts and efforts.
After the V1's delivery, I should gather feedback about the deliverable and combine them with the key findings from previous tests and interviews to iterate the V1 design, then start the next production cycle.
