Creating a better work management tool for engineers
As the sole Product Designer on Flow, I was in charge of the entirety of its look and feel, design system, and UX. I also did all of the front end development on Flow for my first 8 months on the position.
UX Problem
How do we create a single source of truth for people in the engineering field to collaborate, stay in sync, and send files for review without information being missed or overlooked?Solution
Flow- a PLM software for engineers that guides them through all steps of the engineering process from creating an initial pbs to sending off an RFQ.Goals
Be the single source of truth for hardware development: A large painpoint we discovered in the ideation process was that peoples workflows were too dispersed between multiple softwares. Flow seeks to remedy that.
Appeal to everyone involved in the Engineering process: from Clients to suppliers and engineers themselves, we wanted to make flow a place for everyone.
Core Functionality
Below is the hub page for a product on flow. The hub page is where you can upload files, create RFQ’s, and comment on timeline events specifically relevant to a product.
Dark Mode Compatibility
All of Flow was designed to be able to navigate between light and dark mode based on system settings. Here is an example of a darkmode layout in Flow.
Core Functionality- Evolution
A look at a past iteration of these pages from a previous iteration of the app. This version featured a 1:1 chat module, a different color scheme, a different approach to the right sidebar, and context tag filtering.
User interviews
Throughout design and development we conducted many user interviews with internal and external stakeholders to figure out exactly what flow needed to be. In the beginning I simply wanted to understand what an engineers workflow looked like, as I was coming from a different industry.After I become familiar with their workflows, it was time to figure out Who exactly our main demographics were. In this stage I spoke to mostly external stakeholders and our beta testers to learn more about the niches within the industry and where they fit. I came up with three main personas, Designers, Managers, and Suppliers.
Tree View
A currently Scrapped idea that took considerable work from myself and our Web Developer is the product tree. The idea of the tree is that you have a visualized breakdown of your PBS’ structure. Personally I feel like the key to making this tree view practical is to give it a feature alongside it that isnt found any other place in the app.
Products and the PBS
The product breakdown structure is flows solution to an outline it is where you see all of your products sub deliverables and their relation to eachother. The PBS shows you the status of a product (indicated by the ‘traffic light’ to the right of the selected sub deliverable, and also how the entire product is structured. You can add a product in the PBS, or on an organizations hub page, solong as you have the proper permissions. 
Timelines
The user sees the context they are currently in through an easy to digest timeline. The timelines content will change depending on if they are viewing a deliverable, organization, or user profile. 