With Laserfiche’s dedication to its’ Business Process Automation platform, there was one product that was missing from the suite- Robotic Process Automation.

Background

Laserfiche’s cloud suite is focused on optimizing digital processes and automated workflows. The business value of the RPA tool is to automate the ~10% of tasks that can’t be done in Laserfiche’s current products. Successfully delivering this product would mean our users could create fully automated workflows without any need for human intervention.

My Role

I led the UX (User experience) and UI (User interface) design for Laserfiche’s RPA tool called, “Bots”. I took the project over in April of 2018, and led it to a beta release in February 2019. After the beta, we successfully launched in February 2020.

My Responsibilities

  • Perform competitive analysis on the markets top RPA providers

  • Conduct user interviews and internal testing

  • Identify MVP requirements to get the Bots product to launch

  • Provide iconography, research, and designs for my scrum team

  • Collaborate with team members across 3 different time zones including Toronto, Shanghai, and Los Angeles

  • Deliver a new experience for the Bots recorder, designer, and monitor

Challenges

  • Very few initial business and design requirements

  • Executing product strategy and prioritizing feature development to meet our users needs

  • Integrating a design system into solutions that didn’t have 1:1 pattern matches

Primary Goal: Deliver a remarkable solution that our users could trust to reliably automate the previously manual tasks in their workflows

Research & Requirement Gathering

As the design lead on this new project, my first piece of business was interviewing the stakeholders, lead developers, and, and technical product manager (TPM) to understand the following:

  • The scope of the project

  • If we had already identified our target users

  • How RPA worked and who were the main players in the space

  • Known table stakes to have Bots ready for its’ beta and official release

Our target users were already identified by product marketing, but the feature scope wasn’t set in stone. Through internal interviews and a competitive analysis of other RPA tools I began understanding what features were necessary. I performed a deep dive on RPA use cases and how users were using this technology to optimize processes.

RDA user event triggers

UI Path - User triggered events

Automation Anywhere - Task action list

One of the key takeaways from this phase was that we needed more than a recorder. Users required a tool to manage and edit their bots, as well as a place to monitor a bots performance.

Wireframing

Because this project was extremely technical, there were a lot of moving parts. To stay fluid with the changing requirements and technical constraints, I sketched wireframes to first confirm that the user flows were acceptable. Once the flows were accepted by all accountable parties, I could move on to higher fidelity designs.

Internal Testing

Validating use cases

As the engineering team continued to develop features, I wanted to ensure that we were on the right track for our target user.

We identified business analysts and program managers as users with the technical know how and use cases to take advantage of RPA. Luckily, we had internal employees who matched these roles.

I sat down with these users on multiple occasions to gather UX feedback on the development versions of our software. These internal sessions were vital for tracking pain points and prioritizing new features.

Designs

Bots Recorder: User can start, pause, and save their bot. Screens above show adding and editing a comment to a recorded action.

Bots Designer: Trial UI with limited functionality and product marketing messaging

Bots Designer: In-line error messaging leveraging Laserfiche’s design system

Bots Designer: Skip step activity where users can bypass events

Bots Action History: Users can review a bot in action, ensuring a successful run

Bots Monitor: Follows design patterns from Workflow and Business Processes monitor pages

Bots Monitor: Instance view displaying state design for RPA events

Bots Monitor: Dedicated tab for error, warning, and informational messages

Outcome

The team successfully delivered the Bots product via a beta release in February 2019 with the full release following in February 2020. Before the release, I ran usability testing at Laserfiche’s Empower conference with actual users where we utilized user feedback to prepare Bots for our official launch. Laserfiche’s Bots is a live and supported product within it’s BPA suite.

Lessons learned

  • Overcommunicate when working with remote and international teams

    • Take the time to learn what style of communication works best, especially when there’s a language barrier

  • Don’t be afraid to get feedback early on - it’s better to learn why something won’t work before you spend hours designing

  • Great ideas can come from anywhere, encourage engineers and other stakeholders to participate in the design process