Modern Bloomberg 2021–current
Bloomberg's Enterprise Product Ecosystem
2021–Current
Bloomberg is well known for their financial information news services and the Terminal, a financial information, analysis, and collaboration platform.
In addition to the media and Terminal based financial information services, Bloomberg offers various enterprise products and solution via the web to allow enterprises to directly access data and various analytical tools.
Since joining the company in early 2021, I worked as part of the Crescent Design System team and supported the various enterprise product team to create modern user experiences.
Main Problems to Solve
The users of Crescent Design System were confused about how to use and what to use, resulting in inefficiencies and a high level of design churns.
There was a high level of inconsistencies within the product, the design system. This resulted in some significant issues, including low usability due to inconsistencies and partial QA.
One major issue that was identified was that there was a large number of teams and projects that were being built often without design support. This resulted in sub-standard user experiences, which in turn caused end-users to contact support or simply drop off.
One of the main complaints and painpoints was that all personas, PMs, ENGs, and designers, felt that they were not sufficiently informed of new features and releases, which resulted in conflicting roadmaps and outdated designs.
My Contributions
Based on the initial generative research, we identified the various and scattered touchpoints, painpoints, and opportunities. The following areas have been my main focus and contribution areas.
One of the first things I did when I joined the team was creating a consolidated set of sources of truth. Through various audits, assessments, and interviews, a set of tools and platforms were selected as the go-to location for information, references, and resources.
Another aspect that was discovered during the initial audit and assessment was certain lack of processes. I worked with team members to create standard processes.
Armed with consolidated source of truth, and shared common processes, I led the team to find discrepancies, redundancies, and opportunities for design improvements through the design system and produts adopting it.
As the product (design system) stablized and matured, the team started shifting focus to providing support to the users of the system through communication, training, and providing services such as design office hours and co-designing.
1. Source of Truth
As with any fast moving new teams, there was certain level of lack of documentation and lack of system of documentation. Information was either missing, or scattered across multiple paltforms including InVision, Google Drive, Sketch, and internal CMS. And naturally these were often out of sync.
This was causing a lot of confusion and discrepancies between design, build, and among designers.
My first steps was to identify tools and platforms for documentation.
- Single team folder on Google Drive for all files
- Internal CMS site for documentation & guidelines
- A single team space in Figma for design studies and final designs
Once the platforms were identified and set up, I worked with the team to audit and assess the existing designs and started consolidating and simplifying.
Outcome
* The reports on the right were captued in March, 2022
This is very much a work in progress. This new design system is being adopted at the moment, and naturally we haven't been able to capture much business impact yet.
These numbers, hopefully, will provide some high level overview of what we have been working on and the impact on the design of the product. The numbers reported here are most likely to change, but I hope it's clear that, at least, the team now has good foundations based on comprehensive audits and rigorous systematization and design explorations, and is ready to move to the nxet phase.
2. Process for Success
As the design system grows and starts getting adopted, the team realized that we needed to better define and practice processes. Without some of these processes clearly defined, the team tended to be reactionary rather than proactive and strategic, and overriding or overstepping each other’s work.
Here were some of the core processes that were lacking:
- End to end design process
- Shared backlogs with stakeholders and engineers
3. Maturing product
Armed with the new processes and documentations, I am leading the effort to audit the various components and patterns, and refine them with focuses on the following areas:
- Consistency
- Usability (heuristics review, user testing)
- Design refinement
Here are some of the examples.
4. Working with users
As the product (design system) stablized and matured, the team started shifting focus to providing support to the users of the system in a scalable way.
This is being done through regular communications, training, and providing services such as design office hours and co-designing.
Design Office Hour
Currently I’m running a weekly Design Office hour, where the design system team is available to answer questions, discuss issues, and even brainstrom together.
Co-designing
In addition, I am embedded in 3 enterprise products as their lead designer.
Enterprise product support
Designing the system over individual pages
Boomberg's Enterprise Console is a platform where customers can create, monitor, and manage various APIs to use the data services that Bloomberg provides. It's a complex system that comprises multiple types of connections, data types, and data sets.
Scalability and operationalizability were some of the core principles in the teams’ spaces for various circumstantial reasons. Here are some of my focus areas at the moment:
- Design strategy
- Systems design
- Page structure and templates
- Ease of adoption and implementation
- Training other designers and non-designers.
Consistency at scale
Systemic consistency can be a tricky thing, and requires careful planning and strategy that can work for the given particular audience. Through the initial assessment, we knew that we had to make it simple and flexible in order for the identified user types with vastly varying needs to be successful.
The core strategies included:
- Strong consistency at the foundational level
- Open consistency at the detail level
- Simplify the system with non-designers as the target designers
- Rely on multifaceted activation (documentation, training, and persistent support)
Design Examples (Enterprise Console)
Outcome
This is a large multi-team project still in progress with long-term goals that stretches beyond 2022.
This is an overview of the work that I personally led or contributed.
