Great Expectations is a Utah based data company. Established in 2017 as an open source offering (OSS) allowing users to quickly select from a large list of flexible "Expectations" or rules to run against their organizations data.
I joined Great Expectations as a product designer as one of 2 designers in an organization of well over 30+ engineers. I was able to spend about 1 month with the previous designer and head of product before both of them moved on to pursue other career options. I was then the sole designer as I supported design work across GX Cloud application along with our documentation site. Leading UX and UI work let me embrace the complexity of ambiguous product problems and experiencing a startup mentality. My key achievements that I worked on are listed:

As daunting as it was being the sole designer for a bit, my first course of action was to continue the existing design process. It consisted of tickets from engineering teams and working very closly with the CTO to break down work as we rebuilt our product team. It was quite straightforward but no where near the standard process I wanted. I was left in a great spot, the team had mostly focused on research, understanding the core problem, flushing out user personas and a foundational prototype. I soaked up hours of interview recordings and reviewed all the information that was offered and hit the ground running.

Once our product team was more flushed out which consisted of a team of: 2 Designers, 3 Product Managers, and Head of Product. We were able to better flush out our design process. Still being a bit rough around the edges it was still much more standarized and allowed us to better break up work to divy up to our teams, and helped keep focus on releasing our beta launch in Fall of 2024. Still not the most polished process but we were gaining trust within the company and most importantly of all trusting the process. 

Upon our initial launch, we had been established as the "Data quality tool of choice" for companies that provided us a lot of great feedback. Users were able to get connected and apply GX's Expectations and gain valuable insights into their organizations data. I relied heavily on feedback that was a bit nuanced but very much important to users: the ability to pass the application and testing of the Expectations to others within their own organization. Being a non-technical user myself, I very much related to one of our target user groups consisting of analysts, subject matter experts and sales users to be able to not have to run any terminal or code and be able to test my data.

I worked with the team to create a user journey map to better convey to the organization that we needed to simplify and allow for a more accessible way for users to get started and experience GX Cloud's "value moment." The reason for this work is to identify how users currently experienced OSS offering and how that would best translate to a web application GUI.

We needed a major rehaul of the web application since users were not all familiar with the OSS workflow. It required many steps that were not necessary when it came to the Cloud application. We needed to reduced specific terminology that were unique to GX and created a more straight forward approach. Letting users sign up, Connect to their desired data source, select Expectations, and run to get validation results to reveal insights.
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The final user journey mapping focused on GX Cloud with GX OSS concepts hidden to reduce confution and improve user experience. We advocated for removal of the concepts of "Expectation Suite" and "Checkpoints." While important part of the OSS offering this only complicated GX Cloud.

The product team was now fully operational and focusing on next top priorty items to address such as product features to improve GX Cloud experience and align more with exisiting features OSS users were using. Rehauling the product gave us a lot of valuable feedback from both existing users and new users alike. Many users expressed ease of use by keeping navigation simple and straight forward, grasping the product was improved and creation of Expectations was much faster.

Overhauling our application was done in other Product decision to ensure that we are allowing GX to reach the right users and allow our offering to a more wider range of users. Focusing on decisions that offered better product visibility and increase product adoption. OSS offered a variety of integration but GX Cloud was not, so we shifted focus on the best experience for the most commonly used Data source connection, Snowflake which consisted of roughly over 60% of our user base. This allows us to deliver the best experience while using it as a baseline of how we should approach the next data source options to work on.

One the last projects I worked on after overhauling the main GX Cloud app was letting users get an idea of what the connected data asset contains. This prototype encompasses a year of work to simplify and creating a more streamlined experience of GX Cloud. This project was focused around getting users started quickly and have the ability to see the "value moment" of GX Cloud.