Building a Scalable UI System

I produced and managed a system where concepts could be easily tested via CMS to determine a MVP’s scope and impact.

With this system, more than 30 ideas were tested over three years resulting in 15 new features contributing to 115% in user growth.

Background

At the end of 2019 ValuePenguin went through an acquisition and the merging of LendingTree’s product team and ValuePenguin’s SEO team resulted in an increased number goals and projects which exceeded engineering output. We needed a better method of prioritizing projects backed by data and testing.

Audit

I worked with the engineering team to determine which elements could be extracted from existing components and what other elements are needed for a component testing library.

Once that list was created, I could tackle filling in the gaps:

Find the “overlaps” in proposed projects and asks from the product and SEO teams
Specify variations and defaults needed product by product
Clarify the taxonomy and create documentation

Planning and ideating

What do we want?

Engagement points for users.
Ways to organize and display product data.
Method of capturing user engagement and other analytics.

So what do we need?

This diagram shows the overlap on some elements needed between the 2 teams.

What am I delivering?

10+ new elements
New attributes to existing elements
Documentation on repurposing an internal data management (JSON) service
Training on how to use new elements, nesting, and managing data

The combination of these new elements, updated core elements, and internal data management service gave me the flexibility to test over 30+ MVPs with no additional engineering resources.

Additional perks of this system:

Empowered the team. Anyone could test, on any page.
Impact is instant. Ability to roll out MVP “wins” to more pages while the new feature is being developed
Reduced “busy work”. Updating data across the site could be done in minutes instead of hours