Stride

Product design - Strategy - Management - User research - Vendor relations

As a Stride designer I’ve led and contributed to core + supporting app experiences across web, desktop, and mobile while collaborating with other internal Atlassian teams as well as external vendors. The breadth of my work at Atlassian spans across three main categories.


Ecosystem

The Stride Ecosystem team was responsible for building patterns, components, and APIs for third-party vendors; allowing them to integrate their add-ons into Stride. I led the Ecosystem design team which included duties such as assisting in defining strategic vision, roadmap planning, vendor design reviews and collaboration, internal design direction, internal design feedback, cross-geo internal team collaboration, and component, pattern, and documentation creation. The team followed a very fast-paced, iterative process. We typically designed, specced, and built components and patterns that released internally, then gathered feedback, made adjustments, and shipped to our customers. As new components were designed and released, I worked closely with third-party vendors to help integrate them into their apps and gathered user feedback that contributed to continued iterative changes.

Stride Core

In addition to leading Ecosystem design, I also contributed to core Stride design initiatives. There were a ton of projects, features, and exercises that I participated in and contributed to. Some of those things include:

  • User onboarding: I collaborated with PMs, developers, and other designers to create a solid onboarding experience across web, desktop and mobile. We worked together in “war room” sessions doing things like competitive analysis, reviewing user feedback, and whiteboarding to define rules and help shape the overall approach. Once were nailed all of that down, I created designs, prototypes, and specs to bring the experience to life. My focus was primarily on mobile onboarding but I also contributed to the web and desktop patterns.
  • Multi-site/Multi-account: This feature allows users to connect multiple Stride sites across single or multiple Atlassian accounts within a single instance. I integrated it into the Atlassian global navigation pattern that’s used across the entire product suite on web/desktop. I collaborated with the core Atlassian Design Guidelines (ADG) team through sparring/feedback session in order to get what was needed for Stride into the navigation bar. Changes to app and user settings patterns were also required to surface multiple sites and their options. I also created new mobile navigation and setting patterns to ensure a consistent cross-platform experience.
  • System messages: Previously in Stride all messages came from users, and we needed a new way to surface relevant events/messages to users at a system level. I designed the system messages pattern to inform users when someone has joined or left their team, joined or left a room, a room has changed state, and more. Thorough competitive analysis and feedback reviews were conducted to inform the initial list and designs were created for web, desktop, and mobile. The end result was a simple solution that could be easily expanded upon to provide the most relevant messages to users across all platforms.
  • Group chat: We consistently received feedback that the act of creating a room to talk to teammates often felt too heavy. If teammates wanted to come together to quickly chat about a topic or make a decision on something they had to jump through some unnecessary hoops to do so using a room. We needed a more lightweight, more ad-hoc way of allowing users to message multiple teammates so we created the group chat pattern. Competitive analysis, feedback gathering, and user studies were conducted to inform the pattern across web, desktop, and mobile.

ADG & Mobile Core

The Atlassian Design Guidelines (ADG) and Mobile Core teams are responsible for shaping design patterns that work across the entire Atlassian product suite. It’s huge task and often requires voluntary contributions from product designers outside of those two teams. Design systems and tooling to improve process and productivity are some of my passion areas so I found that contributing to and collaborating with these teams provided a nice outlet to scratch that itch. Some of my contributions included Sketch ADG GUI Kit symbol creation, mobile buttons, mobile table cell styles, mobile text fields, mobile onboarding patterns, modal dialog improvements, global navigation features, and more. Overall I feel really happy in knowing that the contributions that I’ve made has helped other team members build solid solutions to complex problems in a more consistent, simple, and efficient way.