The situation
Inovalon had grown into four business units through various acquisitions serving payer, provider, pharmacy, and life sciences customers. Most products had their own patterns and front-end frameworks. A unified "Inovalon branded" experience was lacking — it slowed development, the "SaaS" experience was non-existent, and cross-selling heavily relied on phone calls, meetings, and emails.
Solving the problem
I recognized the issues and pain points through internal interviews, and eventually established a user research practice. The research practice combined the market intelligence of our product management team with the design team's user behavior and preferences expertise. We recognized the lack of an information architecture foundation that could tie the experience across different products. It was not easy — this effort was not officially mandated as part of the design team's scope, but I knew it was a crucial foundation. To summarize, here are the actions I took:
- Designing the components was easy — it was recognizing that the real challenge was alignment across different teams who already had heavy workloads.
- Adoption across engineering and marketing was achieved by understanding each team's goals, and establishing a trusted partnership between design and the functional teams.
- The design team had to model what we preached — critique sessions, weekly QA rituals, and leveraging sprint meetings with product and engineering.