News company Bloomberg BNA serves a diverse audience of legal, business and tax professionals. Developing digital solutions for such a specialized—and broad—audience posed a unique challenge for the Bloomberg BNA team.
They needed a product design process that could incorporate feedback from a wide range of stakeholders, all with distinct backgrounds, while still remaining agile enough to rapidly develop new tools for their many verticals.
Their unwieldy design process needed some help. UX Manager Jared Latimer turned to InVision Enterprise to bring his diverse team together. By adopting InVision Enterprise across design, engineering, and other stakeholders, he streamlined and standardized his team’s process, empowering his teams to tackle complex projects with a new level of efficiency.
Bridging design and development
Like many product teams, Bloomberg BNA faced a design-to-development handoff process that involved lots of back-and-forth and a good dose of wasted time.
According to Jared, the launch of Inspect was a key reasons he pushed to adopt Enterprise across teams. Inspect enables developers to gather assets, take measurements, and generate style code straight from an InVision prototype. This singular feature, seamlessly connected to InVision, saved time for both design and engineering.
Getting it right with user testing
Because Bloomberg BNA develops products for such a highly specialized audience, user testing their early designs is crucial to ensure they’re on the right track, and don’t waste valuable engineering resources later on. To this end, InVision prototypes proved critical.
“Throughout the design process, we try to gather up users for testing,” Jared said. “And most of the time, that testing happens in InVision.”
“Before Inspect, it felt like the handoff to engineering used to be as cumbersome as the design process. Now we make a design, get it in InVision, and build it. … The conversation has changed, which allows us to focus on the big problems while all the smaller details are handled.”
— Jared Latimer, UX manager
Creating efficiency from the start
The early stages of Bloomberg BNA’s design process could often be cumbersome, even chaotic, Jared said.
“There really wasn’t a rule,” he said. “It was whatever the designer was used to doing. Often that’s just not scalable or practical.”
“When the designers are spread across many projects as they are, not having the process standardized added so much work to our workflow,” Jared said. InVision Enterprise brought order and clarity.
Related: Design ROI: The business impact of InVision Enterprise
By having their whole design team on InVision Enterprise, they’re able to see what each designer is up to and collaborate more deeply on the process—leaving comments, tracking revisions, and getting notified when a project is updated.
Elevating design company-wide
InVision Enterprise has done more than improve collaboration between designers and developers—it’s improved collaboration across the company, Jared said.
Thanks to Enterprise’s user-specific roles and permissions, stakeholders from different departments are looped into the design process as reviewers, giving them an easy and meaningful way to contribute to the design process—something that was previously impossible.
“Each product now has several stakeholders,” Jared says. “Commercial product directors, editors, marketing, tons and tons of people. By having everyone on InVision, it allows us to balance the business needs with development.”
Want to build better products, faster and more collaboratively? Learn about InVision Enterprise.
by Ben Goldman
Ben is a Content Strategist at InVision. Before InVision, he co-founded the local news startup Blockfeed and served as a marketing consultant for early stage startups. In his free time, he writes sci-fi, daydreams about future technology, and makes chocolate chip pancakes for his wife and two kids.
