Oracle Internship 2023
I spent summer 2023 as a UX Design Intern on the Global Business Unit (GBU) UX Central team. I re-designed the Redwood Project Inventory, a project tracker that monitors the design projects across 10 GBUs. I worked alongside Morgan Rogers, the other UX Design Intern on the team.
Duration: 12 weeks (May 30, 2023 – August 18, 2023)
Role: UX Design Intern
Tools: Figma, FigJam
Background
What is Redwood?
Redwood is the name of Oracle’s design philosophy, design process, and design system.
You can read more about Redwood here.
Oracle is trying to push its design projects to follow the Redwood design process and philosophy.
While working on my project, I went through the Redwood design process. Steps of the process include:
Understanding the user and their goals
Writing current and ideal scenarios
Iterating on low-fidelity wireframes
Generating high-fidelity prototypes with the Redwood Design System
What is a GBU?
Oracle has 10 GBUs, or Global Business Units. The GBUs are semi-autonomous and focus on a single vertical market. For example, FBGBU (Food & Beverage) works on projects such as self-ordering kiosk systems, while HGBU (Hospitality) works on projects such as hotel-booking applications. Each GBU has a UX Lead that oversees the design work of the projects occurring within the GBU. Oracle’s 10 GBUs are listed below.
Some GBUs have not fully implemented the Redwood user experience into their designs yet, either because they were recently acquired by Oracle or because they don’t have the design support to do so. I worked on the GBU UX Central team, whose goal is to help the GBUs adopt the Redwood user experience by providing support and resources regarding Redwood. The UX Central team is comprised of UX researchers and designers that assist the GBUs on their design projects, often working on a specific GBU project when that GBU’s other designers are unavailable. My team oversees the overall UX progress of the 10 GBUs.
Research
We conducted nine 30-60 minute user interviews over Zoom. Our goal with these interviews was to understand users’ current experience, needs, and pain points with the Redwood Project Inventory.
Our first few interviews were with the stakeholders of this project, the project manager and director of the UX Central team. They are mainly responsible for monitoring the data within the Redwood Project Inventory and eventually using this data to produce reports on overall GBU progress with implementing Redwood.
After talking with our stakeholders, we discovered another user group that regularly engages with the Redwood Project Inventory: the UX Leads of each GBU. They are mainly responsible for inputting data about their GBU’s projects into the Redwood Project Inventory.
The Current Solution: The Redwood Project Inventory and Design Reviews
The existing Redwood Project Inventory was created by the UX Central team to track the Redwood projects the GBUs were working on. Dashboard visualizations provide some high-level information for the UX Central team, like the status of projects across all of the GBUs.
Note: Due to Oracle’s NDA policy, I am unable to show Oracle’s font, color styles, components from the Redwood Design System, or customer/partner information. I modified the screenshot of the existing application to comply with the guidelines.
An individual project’s page prioritizes 4 checkpoints of the Redwood design process with UX Leads expected to update the page when each project finishes a checkpoint.
The GBUs go through weekly design reviews with the UX Central team to ensure their projects are adhering to Redwood guidelines and to receive frequent feedback on their designs. Currently, design review frequency and notes are tracked separately on a Confluence page.
Problems with the Existing Solution
The existing solution’s biggest problem is its data inaccuracy due to infrequent updates by the UX Leads. Data inaccuracy leads to distrust and even less frequent use of the platform.
Because design reviews are currently tracked separately on Confluence, it is inconvenient for UX Central Leadership to reference multiple project-tracking sources when following the progress of a project.
Success Criteria
From our stakeholder interviews, we developed success criteria for our project.
More frequent engagement with the Redwood Project Inventory results in less data being inputted during each interaction, and the UX Leads don’t have to dig as far back through their GBU project history to input information.
Currently, UX Central Leadership engages with the Redwood Project Inventory less frequently due to distrust in the data. Ideally, they would like to always have the platform open in the background so they can quickly glance and see how Redwood projects are doing across the GBUs.
Activities performed during the week it takes to compile data:
Contacting UX Leads over Slack to confirm data
Waiting for UX Leads to respond
Updating the data in the Redwood Project Inventory
Compiling the data into a presentation to be sent to higher GBU leadership
Both user groups currently have low confidence when engaging with the Redwood Project Inventory because of data inaccuracy and confusion with the process of inputting data.
User Goals
We created personas for our two user groups based on our user interview findings:
Lizzie the UX Lead
Dory the Director of the UX Central team
We defined the roles and user goals of each user.
Scenario-writing: Current and Future
Current Scenario
We wrote a current scenario for both Lizzie and Dory as they engage with the Redwood Project Inventory.
This scenario describes Lizzie’s current process of inputting data into the Redwood Project Inventory. The red text at the bottom of the panels indicates pain points Lizzie experiences.
This scenario describes Dory’s current process of pulling data from the Redwood Project Inventory to compile into a quarterly report for higher GBU leadership.
Future Scenario
We then started brainstorming solutions that could help alleviate the pain points our users currently encounter with the Redwood Project Inventory. We created ideal scenarios for Lizzie and Dory as they use the Redwood Project Inventory to accomplish their user goals.
Transitioning to the Designs
To transition from our future scenarios to our low fidelity designs, we created high-level flows that helped us determine what types of screens the user would be interacting at each step. We created flows for Lizzie adding a project, Dory exporting data from the Redwood Project Inventory for a presentation, and Dory adding design review notes to a project.
Iterating on the Designs
UX Lead Dashboard
Note: I am unable to show the exact high fidelity designs that we ended up prototyping due to Oracle’s NDA policy. I modified some of the designs below to comply with the guidelines.
We then started designing individual screens. First, Lizzie’s dashboard. We wanted to make the dashboard information more useful to UX Leads. Currently, the same dashboard visualizations are displayed for both Central Leadership and UX Leads, but the high-level overview of projects is only useful to Central Leadership–UX Leads only care about what’s happening within their own GBU.
Iteration 1
Final Design
Adding Project Drawer
For the drawer to add a new project, we made the language more conversational and provided an option to reduce redundancy of the process.
Iteration 1
Final Design
Individual Project Page
Finally, we went through many iterations for the individual project page. Changes included prioritizing the most important features and actions and changing components to adhere to the Redwood design system.
Iteration 1
Iteration 2
Final Design
Other Features
Other screens that were not included in the specific flows above but are important to the Redwood Project Inventory re-design are from Central Leadership’s perspective. Central Leadership can see a list view of all of the projects the GBUs have worked on with the ability to filter them. They can also see a high-level overview of all of the GBU Redwood projects through the dashboard, which can be useful for creating reports.
Central Leadership List View
Central Leadership Reporting Dashboard
Reflection
Watch my reflection video over my internship below!