Bonterra | Nova - Form Creator
Summary
As part of my Design System audit that I was doing at the time, I noticed that our Form Elements were outdated, clunky, and hard to use. After having multiple conversations with my manager, VP of Product, and every developer I could get one-on-one time with, I decided to create some proof of concept designs to get the ball rolling.
In the Grant Management space, complex forms should be our bread and butter. Unfortunately, our company was so old that many developers had touched different parts of our system for decades and every part was coded differently each time. We could not make global changes without ripping everything apart...So, I asked if we could rip everything apart :)
Challenges
- Finding ways to make all form elements uniform.
- Scope creep was always hard to eliminate. It was something that needed to be done, but everyone had different ideas on how to execute and how it should evolve.
- Not on the roadmap so it was a struggle to get buy-in. There was a very "if it's not broken, dont fix it" attitude from the C-Suite.
Existing UI, Initial concepts & evolution
Process
Again, I was working on a Design System audit so I met with my Manager to see if this is something that I would be able to add into my regular workload after noticing our deficiencies in standardizing forms. This did not follow typical UX team workflows because of this reason, but he loved it!
I researched drag and drop form creators (like Google Forms), one click edit buttons (similar to Jira, but accessible) and I also wanted to re-envision how our users interact with content in a sandbox area before publishing. I wanted to make this as easy as possible for the users, and the developers. I even created solutions for custom field creation, labeling, and mapping.
I then created mockups of what this experience could look like and it snowballed all the way up to my manager's manager and other VP's.
Final Comps
Result
Added to the roadmap!
My work was used to show a glimpse of where our software can go. The form elements were prioritized and to my knowledge, "project NOVA" is still being considered once development resources become available.