Defining and delivering a vision
Leveraging research, concept design, and co-creation to inspire a global community to re-imagine complex data exploration.
Introduction
OpenSearch Dashboards contains several duplicative data exploration experiences in the same product. This made scaling the product challenging and lead to user confusion. I was tasked with unifying and elevating the data exploration experience.
If a digital product stops working you would use OpenSearch to understand what happened,
when, and why? I made it easier for users to answer these questions.
A quest for understanding and alignment
Despite initial resistance to research due to time constraints, I implemented a lean research plan. By sharing results with cross-functional teams at each stage, I secured support for deeper research. This led to alignment, informed decision-making, and the discovery of critical tech debt that could have caused significant issues if overlooked.
Research findings were synthesized into a future state flow. As I created the UI I added wireframes to make it easier to visualize.
Using confidence to iterate UX fidelity
Through 6 months of iteration I worked with engineering, product, the open source community, and users to test and evolve our interfaces. The driving force for updating fidelity was gauging how confident we were in the current iteration.
Advanced prototyping got results fast without a line of code
Variable based prototyping at the component level allowed me to iterate quickly and create detailed and nuanced prototypes without a line of code. These proved invaluable for communication with stakeholders, the open source community and testing.
Documenting strategy to execution in Github
I published proposals, feature requests, and issues into Github to raise awareness with the open source public, but also align UX, engineering, and PM creating a single thread from strategy to execution.
View in Github
One vision - in the open source.
"We tasked Shanil with conceptualizing the next generation experience of exploring data inOpenSearch. Not only did he end up designing delightful new experiences for our customers, but he did so in a way that helped drive the open source vision for OpenSearch."
– Eli Fisher -Senior Manager PM, Amazon Web Services
