HERE Platform

The HERE Platform is a place where customers work with location data and APIs to build unique and powerful products and internal tools.

I led a team of designers in the design of a new marketplace area to monetize data products that were built on the platform. Customers could purchase data from HERE or from other platform customers, enrich it with their own data or logic, and sell the new data product to others. It was quite a shift away from how HERE had traditionally sold its own data.

In this project, design, product management and engineering teams were distributed across several sites in Europe and North America. The tangible artifacts from the design team helped to expose assumptions early, provoke discussions, and to make decisions that moved the project forward faster.

Principal UX Designer

Key contributions

  • Estimating effort to scale the design team with an external vendor as the project ramped up from kickoff to concept to production. Aligning with the product and engineering team counterparts on scope and delivery.

  • As a completely new product, the discovery and concepting phases were key for pointing us in the right direction. I ran marketplace buyer discovery workshops, developed personas from customer interviews, and coordinated with our in-house research team to plan iterative user testing.

  • As a compIex new project, everyone came with their own perspectives. I led journey mapping sessions with cross-functional stakeholders and maintained them online, enabling teams to plan while the scope and some requirements were still in flux.

  • I designed and iterated on key marketplace journeys as we moved from concept through to development. Together with the rest of the marketplace design team we stress-tested and extended HERE’s design system in the process.

Part of a larger platform, the marketplace allows sellers to price and attach products to marketplace listings. Sellers are in control over who listings are made visible to.

The marketplace MVP was developed with feedback from pilot customers.

Research and discovery

The marketplace required areas for data providers and data consumers to sell and buy data products. From interviews with pilot customers we created proto-personas with their high-level needs and how we would serve them.

Working with our user research team, both journeys went through several rounds of research at varying fidelity – first with HERE employees, and later with external pilot customers.

Co-creating the ideal purchase journey with data engineers. With their help, we could identify key moments and pain points to focus on.

Some early mockups. We tested these with internal data engineers,first, to iron out the high level concepts. Later iterations were validated with pilot customers.

Buyers

Data Engineer
Project Lead

Pain points

Appropriate content, coverage and format are hard to find.

Uncertainty over legal restrictions when using data

Proposition

Find quality data from HERE's partners and customers.

Build directly in HERE Platform.

Reliable usage reporting for billing and tracking ROI.

Sellers

Data Engineer
Data Sales Manager

Pain points

Unfamiliarity with pricing and legal considerations.

Presenting commercially-sensitive data.

Custom licensing terms for bespoke deals.

Proposition

Monetise the value of your data.

A guided listing creation experience with control over what is shown and who can see it.

Reliable usage reporting for billing and tracking ROI.

Design as a tool for collaboration

Especially with new products, people tend to come the project with their own interpretations and assumptions. Through visualisation, prototyping and workshop facilitation, the design team was central in aligning the team across sites and disciplines on what we were aiming for, and where decisions still needed to be made.

Workshopping early journeys with the team - the journey stretched across another 3 walls. The feedback from this session formed the backbone of the solution that was later released.

An early overview of end-to-end journeys in Confluence.

To help scope and plan for production, the design team managed an overview of the end-to-end journey in Confluence. This helped the team stay visible on our solution, as well as where there were still gaps to address together.

Doing this in Confluence rather than in a design tool allowed the dev team to add their own notes to help their planning – such as identifying backend and frontend dependencies for each keyscreen. The keyscreens were later mapped to features in Jira, from where development was managed.

Mapping the purchase journey through different states to see where we can simplify the process.

A high level customer journey map for a larger feature. A high level pass like this often helped the team understand scope and complexity before diving deeper.

Outcome

MVP release

The MVP was released on time, scoped to focus on the seller experience. Initial use was heavily weighted towards private transactions. In the following year HERE onboarded and opened the buyer experience to all platform customers.

Storefront for HERE products

Following its initial release, and enabled by other improvements throughout the platform, the marketplace has become the primary channel through which the company distributes and provisions data products. The marketplace is now a pillar of HERE's ongoing transformation into a platform company.

Learnings

What made this project unique?
What could have we done better?

Broad early scope, driven by pilot customer demands.

Closer customer collaboration could have helped us scope the product better.

In future projects I and my team have helped teams focus by using:

  • Value Proposition Canvas

  • Feature discovery workshops

  • Jobs to Be Done

  • Experience metrics

Design concepting began before engineering teams had joined.

The design team did a great job of exposing disconnects and assumptions amongst the team. However with technical input some of these could have been resolved earlier.

Post-MVP we paired with solution architects from early-on, to understand constraints and to collaborate on solutions.

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