Product design
Align product to existing roles ● Parsable
Parsable provides procedure authoring, tracking, and documentation features for a wide variety of industries. However, clients found the platform impossible to use without training. I interviewed customers and found the Parsable feature set was correct but the product structure didn’t align with existing roles. In general, Parsable clients’ existing procedure authoring responsibilities could be mapped as:
The original Parsable product hierarchy emphasized authoring over everything else. What was even more confusing was that the different authoring components (reference sheets, applets, templates, jobs, and workflows) were presented as peers rather than as part of a strict hierarchy.
I resolved this by organizing existing Parsable features along known procedure management roles:
Further changes
I updated confusing terminology across the platform. For example, in most products, a “template” is typically an element that generates unique instances of itself. In Parsable, a “template” was something added to a job. I made sure the word “template” was applied to a true template feature.
Someone starting a new job had to click a a “Duplicate job” button. I changed the button to say, “Start new job”.
Parsable objects did not have states that logically corresponded to concepts such as “draft,” “underway,” “approved,” “cancelled,” or “saved”. These were defined and clearly displayed to Parsable users.