Internal tools UX · Fadata
Our product management team needed UX improvements in the task creation workflow. They use Aha! to create product roadmaps and epics and define new features, and Jira to create user stories and tasks for our cross-functional development team.
In Aha!, workflows are based on drag and drop, and work items are organised in Kanban boards. In Jira, creating a new task needs more clicks and several popups, which our product owners and managers found difficult and time-consuming.
My goal was to use insights from UX research to persuade our Jira development team to build a new widget with a fresh user experience that solves this problem.
01 · Context of use Understanding the product, environment and emotional state of our users.
02 · Research An online survey to gather user requirements and needs.
03 · Ideate A brainstorming board and user flow diagrams in FigJam.
04 · Wireframe Wireframes and a low-fidelity prototype.
05 · Evaluate Evaluating the solution against the requirements, in iterations.
06 · Design A high-fidelity prototype.
The user-centered design board in FigJam.
We create a lot of repetitive tasks, so our product managers asked the Jira developers for a way to reuse existing tasks instead of creating new ones every time.
The Jira team added a "Clone" option in the context menu of each task on the Kanban board. But this only repeated the "Clone" functionality that already existed in the task details. Our product team still had to go through extra clicks and popup windows, which caused frustration.
On top of this, the design patterns in Jira were very different from Aha!, which made switching between the two tools even harder.
Our product owners and managers have very busy schedules, so getting all of them for user interviews was a challenge. A quick online survey was a better approach.
I already knew some of the answers, because I work very closely with them. My aim was to collect meaningful insights about their needs as Jira users, and then present the results to the Jira development team to discuss the need for a new widget.
I created the survey in MS Forms and invited our 4 product owners and 2 product managers:
A new task creation widget for Jira:
I reused the drag-and-drop pattern from Aha!, which was already used on the Jira Kanban board for task progress. This gave our product team a consistent experience across both tools.
Wireframe of the task creation widget next to the Kanban board.
Final design: cloning an existing task by dragging it into the widget (top), the empty widget for a new task, and the confirmation after creating it.
Our team started an initiative to evaluate the UX of our internal tools and systems and is now proposing design improvements to make the team's daily work easier.
One of my biggest learnings from this project was that internal tools need the same evidence-based case as customer-facing ones to get engineering time. I already knew our product owners and managers found Jira's task creation slow, but that alone wasn't enough — the survey of our 6 product owners and managers gave me the specific data points I needed to make the case to the Jira development team.
This reinforced that reusing a pattern people already trust beats inventing a new one. The widget reused the drag-and-drop interaction from Aha!, already familiar to our product team from the Kanban board, which gave them one consistent way of working instead of two tools with two different logics.
The initiative also became the starting point for a wider effort to evaluate the UX of our internal tools, not just this one workflow.