Christine Danzi

Manager, UX Design

Tech consultant turned Java developer turned UX designer. Happy to have found the role that incorporates my interests in technology, psychology, and design.Almost 10 years in the software industry and always ready for the next challenge.



Process HQ
Environment

Enabling users to understand their record and process data



Schmooz
Video Session App

Video scheduling application side project



RPA Designer
Redesign

Improving robotic process automation (RPA) task creation



Mentorship Program Application

Creating and automating the Appian Mentorship Program


About

I was born in Japan and raised all over thanks to my dad's service in the Navy. Living abroad has given me a greater appreciation for different cultures and has left me with a bit of a travel bug.When I'm not designing (whether for work or personal projects), you can find me looking for a new recipe to try or training for my next race.Most recent race: 2024 Spartan 10K

Involvement

AppianWOMEN / Mentorship Program
Board member, leader, and participant of Mentorship Program. Back in 2017, I presented the idea for a Mentorship Program, and I now have a committee that helps me facilitate programs for mentors and proteges. (350+ matches and counting!)
2016 / 2018 - Present
Graphic Design Guild
Member of Appian Engineering group that creates digital designs for department/team needs.
2018-Present
Community Committee
Member of Appian Engineering group that plans and facilitates social events for the department.
2019-Present

Accomplishments

2021 Impact Award Winner
Won this department award for my work leading the UX design vision for our Robotic Process Automation capabilities in the platform. I was the sole designer across five different teams. Now mentoring and onboarding new designers to the team.
2021 NNg Certified, UX Management
In response to the growth of my current UX team, I wanted to learn more about different strategies when thinking about UX vision and how best to manage that vision across different designers and teams.
2019 Richmond Marathon Finisher
Finally checked this off my bucket list! After months of training, I finished my first marathon.
Finish Time: 4:47:21

Contact

Feel free to connect with me on Linkden or send me an email!

Thank you

Looking forward to connecting with you!

Logos that I've designed over the years. I strive for designs that incorporate themes in simple ways.

FitHiits

Application for generating a workout playlist

Small Books

Mobile application for reading short stories

Remoga

Group for practicing virtual / remote yoga

Blooming Blends

Small business focusing on makeup and floral arrangements

Community Committee

Group that organizes events to facilitate community in department

Micro Workout

Group that practices short, daily 15 minute workouts

CRM Application

Logo concept for a Customer Relationship Management application

OWL Testing

Logo concept for OWL Testing framework

Quali-palooza

Code quality parody: Better code. Better quality. Engineering. (koala was mascot)

Schmooz
Video Session App

Problem

Provide a way for users to chat with key figures in an area of interest

Users

Figure - I want to be able to set up sessions for users to join (for a cost)
Follower - I want to be able to attend sessions of figures I'm interested in

My Role

Lead designer of brand exploration, design library, and core flows.

The Team


The team was composed of three developers and one product manager. Meeting weekly for about 3 months. I collaborated with PM to discuss core users and flows and worked with developers on design implementation.

Branding Exploration

Exploring different light and dark theme variations of the overall branding approach. In the end, the team liked the pomegranate direction.

Fine Tuning the Logo

Using the base pomegranate idea, iterated on different levels of detail and shape orientations. Eventually landed on the last two design iterations in the row below.

Accessibility Check

After landing on the logo shape, I wanted to verify the accessibility of the logo colors when used in different context (primary color used as background/text, secondary color used as background/text., etc. I wanted to find a balance between colors that could still relate to the pomegranate, but could still be used in an accessible way. Thankfully, there are also purple shades of pomegranates. The purple hues lended themselves to a better combination of accessible styles.

Final Logo

Based on the accessibility check above, landed on the final color scheme below. Just needed to be mindful that in certain contexts, we would need to use bold text styling to ensure the text/background combo was still accessible.

Info Page Exploration

The designs below, think through how to highlight the application as a marketing one pager on a website. The top designs were made prior to the color accessibility check exploration.

These next design iterations show the change from the original color scheme above, to the purple-green color scheme. Also wanted to take into account how the layout would appear on desktop vs mobile layouts.

Viewing Sessions

One of the core actions for the figure is to be able to view any current future sessions scheduled with a follower. Confirmed sessions show the winning bid while in progress sessions have an in progress state.

Analyzing Metrics

We also wanted to allow figures to view overall metrics related to the sessions that have been scheduled. The idea here was to provide a sample of metrics and gather feedback on the value that the provide for the user.

Building out Design System

As different screens were being built out, I realized I also needed to setup a reusable set of patterns and components that could be utilized throughout the different scenarios. This helped speed up the design process and allow for a consistent feel across the user flows.

Including Metrics

It's important to think through what metrics we'd want to track as we build out the core user flows. This would help us understand the best areas to focus for improvement and for roadmap planning.


User Engagement Metrics

  • Number of sessions created by “Figures” (hosts) and attended by “Followers” (participants).

  • Average session attendance rate.

  • Repeat attendance: percentage of users who attend more than one session.

Usability Metrics

  • Task success rate: percentage of users able to complete core flows (e.g., booking a session, setting up a session) without errors.

  • Average time to complete key tasks (e.g., setting up a session, joining a session).

  • Number of support requests or reported issues related to session setup or joining.

Business Impact

  • Revenue generated through session bookings (if sessions are paid).

  • Conversion rate from visitor to registered user, and from registered user to paying participant.

  • Growth in user base (both “Figures” and “Followers”) over time.

Takeaways

This was was a great mobile first project to work on outside of my normal job responsibilities (which were mostly desktop designs at the time). It allowed me to think about how to fit content within smaller screen widths without sacrificing functionality. It was also a fun exercise in thinking about branding at a high level and carrying that branding throughout an application.

Mentorship Program Application

Problem

Turn manual process of using spreadsheeting and sending Google forms into a one stop shop for managing mentorship requests.

Users

Participant - I want to be able to sign up and see who my match is
Admin - I want to be able to see requests and send matches

My Role

Lead designer and developer for the entire application. Reviewed my designs with another senior designer.

Proposing the Program

Before I even designed/built the application, I first had to get approval to start the Mentorship Program. When I kicked off the program, it started out with a subset of the company (AppianWomen in 2017) and eventually expanded to the entire company (by 2023).You can read more about the journey from idea to application in this article I wrote for the Appian Blog:

Note: This was written back when I was still a Senior UX Designer

 

Below is the initial plan that I proposed to the AppianWomen board to start the Mentorship Program:

Initial Participant Survey

To confirm interest and to gauge what current employees would be looking for in a program, I sent out a survey to HQ based employees. For context, we envisioned starting the program with a subset of employees to learn and expand.The goal of the survey was to:

  • Confirm we had enough interest in the program

  • Understand a breakdown of experience levels

  • Solicit suggestions and desires for a mentorship program experience

The Team

I led the design and development of the application during weekly development sessions. Another senior UXD would attend the sessions to learn more about Appian development and review my overall approach. I also had a program committee I eventually worked with to plan events for the program.

Application User Goals

The first few years of the Mentorship Program was a very manual process. To improve this experience, I first interviewed previous participants. This gave me insight into the current paint points of the process.As a participant, I want...

  • The ability to view a list of mentors and easily compare. Before: Users had to scroll through a slide deck to view a list of available mentors.

  • The ability to select their top three choices inline. Before: users had to manually compare and switch between the mentor slide deck and a sign-up form.

 

For the admin user, I essentially had to reflect on what I needed from the application. For the first 2 years of the program, I was the sole facilitator, so I knew exactly what I wanted from the admin page:As an admin, I want...

  • To view a list of all requests and have inline validation for repeat matches. Before: I had to use a spreadsheet to match participants

  • To auto send match via an email Before: I had to manually create each email, this took hours depending on how many matches we had)

User Flow

As user enter the core Mentorship site, they will be presented with an overview of the program and a call to action to sign up. Different forms will be displayed depending on what the user chooses to sign up as: A protégé, a mentor, or both.

Wireframes

At a high level, I wanted to think through how to present core program information to the user while also allowing them to sign up and see the status of their assigned match.

Due to how the existing environment (that this application would live in) was already configured, I had to adjust how we ended up showing some of the information. Ultimately, the user would have a core landing page to review program information and then they would be redirected to their dashboard after signing up.

The New Experience

Signing Up
Now users land on a Mentorship Program dashboard and get an overview of what the program is about. They can sign up right afterwards without having to reference different documents/keep track of different links!

Selecting Mentors
Right after signing up, proteges can view the list of available mentors without having to scroll through a slide deck. Makes it easier to see multiple mentors as once without needing to open up multiple tabs or find the separate sing up form.

Managing Matches
As an admin, I can now manage the mentorship timeline and see requests right in the dashboard. No more need for a separate google sheet to track requests.

Metrics + Impact

Developing this application has definitely made it easier and faster to make matches across the company. We initially started with a subset of participants and now it's a global mentorship program, which allows us to pair employees across teams and timezones! A few key highlights:

  • 350+ matches and counting!

  • 8 years of the program

  • 5 years using this application

Takeaways

Going through a typical user flow and having prior user experiences as evidence allowed me to plan out what we needed in the mentorship dashboard. Even after the first round of designs, having real participants go through the flow again was valuable for future improvements. In the end, signing up to be a mentor or protege is a lot easier, and I have less documents to keep track of.

Document Extraction

Problem

Users don't understand how to use current document tools to extract data from forms

User

Task Worker - I want to be able to quickly extract the data I need from a document

My Role

Lead designer on team. Collaborated with other designers in UX reviews.

Research

Conducted usability tests with different end users. Asked them to go through different document extraction scenarios: Gave them an invoice and asked them how they would extract certain data from the form.Findings

  • Most users just started to type into the form manually (they did not notice the automatic capabilities that the form provided)

  • When prompted to use the data extraction functions, they did not notice how to paste the data that was automatically copied

  • Users wanted more guidance on what was possible, in the end the feature was not walk up usable.

Designs

Since users were unaware how to interact with the document extraction form, we decided to provide instructional guidance at the top of the screen. When running another round of usability tests, users read the instructions right away and followed along. They were no longer typing in data manually but actually interacting with the form capabilities to extract data faster and more efficiently.

The next improvement was the copy and paste feature. Above you'll notice that when data is highlighted, arrows appear to the right of the input fields. During initial testing, users were missing this, so instead of keeping the paste functionality hidden, we added arrows inline with the fields. That way, they were already visible as users interacted with the form data.

Upon selecting data in the document, fields that matched the data type should light up to indicate that clicking the arrow will automatically paste that value in the field. So much easier than manually types or having to click and drag to copy values from the document.

Takeaways

Giving users actual documents/scenarios is important to see how they will interact in their actual jobs. Sometimes it's better to give directions up front than assuming users will explore the functionality on their own.

RPA Designer
Redesign

Problem

Old RPA designer doesn't match the rest of the product, and it is hard to configure actions quickly

User

RPA Designer - I want to be able to quickly create RPA tasks within my processes. (Personas described more below.)

My Role

Lead designer on RPA squad. Collaborated with other designers in UX reviews.

The Team

I was the lead designer for the redesign effort. I collaborated with the PO/PM to discuss priorities and incremental changes to the designer. We wanted to ensure that there was parity with our existing designers. I would conduct UX reviews of in-progress tickets and provide implementation support alongside our developers.

Before

Configuring an RPA Task took a lot of clicks to drill into each task and configure each node. Connecting nodes to each other was not very obvious. For additional context, this designer experience was inherited from an RPA company that was acquired in 2020 (Novayre Solutions SL). It was my job to ensure design consistency with the rest of the Appian product.

Personas

It's important to step back and understand the type of user we are designing for. Even when improving upon an existing design experience.

Research

A general survey was sent out to get a sense of how much experience our Appian developers already had with using RPA tools, specifically Appian RPA. I also conducted usability tests to figure out existing pain points with the RPA Designer to target areas of improvement.
Some key areas after the Affinity Mapping exercise were: process variable creation, workflow design experience (starting workflow, linking nodes, multi-action configurations, etc.) We could use these pain points as a way to focus what ways we could improve the design experience.

Design Iterations

In general, we wanted to take the design direction away from the standard look and feel of a process diagram. The goal was to make it more obvious that an RPA task was a piece of a process workflow vs being confused for another process workflow. Due to this, we opted to try out design iterations with more of a top down flow with configuration panels on the side.


Popover Steps


Nested Cards


Indented Cards


Tree Table




PROS

  • Keeps primary flow “simple”

  • Allows transitory “zooming” into specific sub-tasks… but only when a user wants it

Cons

  • Popovers from Popovers gets unwieldy





Pros

  • Shows the full hierarchy.

  • Collapsable tasks & sub-tasks allow an Automation Dev remove noise & focus.

Cons

  • Boxy. Nested boxes get hard to visually decipher if you go too deep.




Pros

  • Shows full hierarchy of tasks

  • Collapsing helps eliminate noise

  • Indentation is less boxy -- providing a “cleaner” looking UI while still visually showing hierarchy

Cons

  • Short process node names combined full width cards results in some wasted real estate



Pros

  • Shows full hierarchy of tasks.

  • The Tree Table Design Pattern could be used for managing Appian Objects as well, providing additional consistency between Object and Process management UIs.

Cons

  • “Searching” for a specific task inside of collapsed tree table can have challenging UX issues

Final Design

The final approach ended up being a combination of the "Nested Cards" and "Indented Cards" approaches from above.Users can now drag their desired actions from a pane on the left and configure each action within the pane on the right. This direction also aligned with the other designer experiences within Appian.You can check out the release notes for setting up a robotic task below:


Metrics and Impact


RPA Adoption Overview

  • 26 RPA customers

  • 15 active in production

  • Across all environments, 37 customers/partners are using RPA

  • Low-code adoption on dev sites and by partners is often a leading indicator of production adoption


Active Adoption by Environment

EnvironmentTotal CountLow Code Count
Production151
Development103
Partner1511

Takeaways

While working on the various design iterations, I was able to collaborate with another senior designer. Being able to just run through different ideas and brainstorm approaches was a great way to come up with a lot of ideas in a shorter amount of time. There's a great deal of benefit from collaborating with other designers to come up with a great end product.


Fun Fact: I was given an Impact Award for the work I did for this initiative.

Process HQ
Environment

Problem

Enable users to understand how their processes are performing, discover bottlenecks, and discover areas of improvement.

Users

Main users of this environment want able to monitor key data for each of the processes that they are responsible for. Breakdown of key personas can be viewed below.

My Role

Lead designer focused on overall dark theme and environment styling guidance. Conducted reviews of three other junior designer's UIs and user flows. Worked with another lead designer on parallel team.

Background

In 2021, Lana Labs was acquired by Appian, which introduced a Process Mining tool within our product toolkit.Process Mining allows users to understand how their processes are performing - identifying bottlenecks and discovering areas of improvement.We wanted to utilized this tool to create a new Appian environment where business analyst could monitor their processes and discover insights: Process HQ

General Timeline

Prior to Q1 of 2023, I had been one of two senior designers on the Process HQ Beta team - building out the first process HQ experience for Beta customers to provide feedback. Starting in Q1 of 2023, we began planning ways to productize the tool. It would be my job to oversee the design direction and design consistency across the Process HQ teams involved in this multi-quarter effort.

The Team

Alpha Pod

I was one of the core designers on the alpha pod. We had to iterate and design quickly to create a working fully working application in a short timeframe. The other designer and I had daily syncs with each other and the PO and PM in order to get feedback fast and make changes accordingly. In some cases, we made our designs in SAIL to speed up development.


Productization Teams

Once we proved out the vision with an initial working solution, we expanded the effort to work on productizing the Process HQ environment. I worked across multiple teams and timezones (US and Germany) to think through design strategy and provide assistance where needed.

  • Junior UXDs - I had 2 direct reports on two of the teams, so I worked closely with them to provide UX feedback.

  • Lead UXD and POs - I had weekly session with the other lead UX designer and collaborated with the POs across the team to understand cross-team priorities

  • InfoDev - It was also important to work with the cross-team Information Developer (InfoDev) to understand content strategy for this environment.

Personas

To ensure we had a cohesive story to tell, we also needed to be aligned on our key personas across this new environment:

Areas of Focus

As I worked across teams and conducted UX reviews of junior designers, I also had a core area of focus:
Ensure design consistency for Process HQ environment
As a result, I worked on certain resources such as a design guideline doc as well and working on a vision for the environment landing page. The goal of the landing page would be to highlight the two core areas of the environment: Process Insights and Data Fabric InsightsYou can see more about my general approach for the landing page below:

Inspiration

I first wanted to look at core patterns across landing pages and specifically wanted to get a feel for dark theme landing pages. For context, the rest of the Appian product has always been in a light theme, and it was part of my job to provide guidance on how this new environment would be styled in a dark theme manner.

Environment Core Concepts

Before diving into what the landing page would look like, it was important to remind myself of the other key pages of the environment and how each core concept should tie back into the home page.

Initial wireframes revolved around a common side pane with a contents section that showcased the core object of that tab. You'll notice even the name of the environment was still being determined (Self Service Analytics vs Process HQ). A collaboration with leadership and marketing was required.

Alternatively for each core page, we could make recent objects easily accessible and allow users to filter/views specific objects based on what they were looking for. We'd need to consider what core action would need to be visible on each page.

Essentially, users would be able to analyze process and record data, and we wanted to promote those core pieces of functionality on the landing page.

Design Iterations

I went through a number of design explorations, playing around with key action location, background styling, and object card styling.

Final Design

The final design of the landing page prioritized:

  • Viewing recently created record reports and dashboards

  • Showcasing the ability to explore other process and data fabric records

You can checkout the latest Appian Release notes, highlighting Process HQ below:


Design Guidelines

Another one of my side deliverables was creating the design strategy for this new environment. To the right, you can see some of the design guidelines I was working on to make sure that designers and developers knew the direction that we wanted to take for the environment.


Usage Impact Testimonials

  • Discovered an unexpected process flow and implemented a change the next sprint to block it. 3 insights have a potential savings of 62,295 days annually. "This would have taken us hundreds of hours to find without Process HQ!" - Product Owner at Vanguard

  • "It only took me 25 minutes to get from a question to an actionable insight. That wouldn’t have been possible without Process HQ." - Senior Business Analyst at Allan Gray

  • Found a vendor was violating their SLA over 90% of the time! In the past, an analyst spent 2 days a month manually analyzing logs to identify SLA breaches. “This is much quicker and more robust than any analysis we were previously doing." - Director of Operations at Lazard

Future Exploration

Page Layout

  • Global search across the environment

  • Ability to track "Favorites"

  • Improved dashboard previews

  • Auto suggest objects based on activity or relevance

  • A section for recent activity to pick up where you left off


Environment Orientation

  • Display an initial welcome message

  • Introduce user to side nave section for navigation

  • Provide a core description of each section as initial guidance


Takeaways

Working across multi teams is a lot of work - at any given day for any given decision, you can have a lot of cooks in the kitchen. It's important to agree upon your key principles and goals so that you can make decisions quickly. As a UX team, we also learned the value of UX reviews within the development cycle and across squads. With the right amount of communication, you can catch design inconsistencies early to ensure that the experience across team features is cohesive.

Playlist Generator

Problem

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My Role

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Research

Design Iterations

Takeaways

Video Session App

Problem

Teams want to be able to track work across a sprint with custom filter and inline editing capabilities

Users

Squad Coach - I want to be able to see how my team is doing
Developer - I want to be able to edit team goals inline

My Role

Designer and co-developer for initial prototype.

Research

Before designer, I interviewed squad coaches, product managers, and designers to discover what functionality they were looking for. Not surprising, each user had different needs, so the main goal was to try to find the typical use cases and allow the sprint map to support those cases.Since there are plenty of existing sprint maps and planning boards out there, I also looked to those as references (JIRA, Trello, etc.) It was interesting to see how data was represented and what editing capabilities are provided.

Design Iterations

First design utilized our card components. Unfortunately due to the limited text functionality at the time, I couldn't truncate the text and instead we ended up with text wrapping. We would have to add custom logic to truncate the text after a certain amount of characters. This first idea focused on showing the planned features across a period of time.

When selecting one of the cards, users would be shown details about that feature and could edit the information from the side panel. The con of this was that it further squished the data on the left.

The next iteration focused on an editable view where we focused on inline editing for that goal. We wanted to have an easy way to read the features across the page and take advantage of the typical wide screens this will be viewed on.

Later, we added the ability to move and add on different feature lines so that users didn't have to reorder if they added features at the end of the list.

The final read-only view incorporated smaller bar images so that we could fit more information on the page. We also moved the text above the bars to reduce text wrapping.

This is one of the final iterations of that first design. Here we are in the edit view where you can edit multiple features at once.

Takeaways

When designing something where different users have different needs, it's important to focus on the main paths for the main users. You can't please everyone, but you can try to make the common actions easy (at least for the MVP) and then later you can work toward future enhancements.

Sugar & Rice

When designing something where different users have different needs, it's important to focus on the main paths for the main users. You can't please everyone, but you can try to make the common actions easy (at least for the MVP) and then later you can work toward future enhancements.

Punderful World

When designing something where different users have different needs, it's important to focus on the main paths for the main users. You can't please everyone, but you can try to make the common actions easy (at least for the MVP) and then later you can work toward future enhancements.

Punderful World


2023

Sugar & Rice


2023