Identifying the Business Problem

Finding the valuable behaviors that we want the Appian users to focus on

Appian acquired the startup Lana Labs to integrate its process mining capabilities into the Appian low-code platform. Before the acquisition, Lana Labs provided process mining consultations to clients, where an in-house customer success team used advanced software to identify and highlight potential process improvements.

The process mining tool developed by the Lana Labs team was designed for experts with advanced knowledge of process mining techniques. As a result, the existing tool’s nature differed significantly from Appian’s vision for self-service process mining insights within their process automation ecosystem.

These are the main challenges that I faced when while working on this project:

• Translating complex technical process mining concepts into a self-service tool for users unfamiliar with business analysis techniques presents a challenge. Appian acquired the startup Lana Labs to integrate their process mining software into a user-friendly, low-code platform. Originally, the Process Mining software was designed for use by a team of customer success experts analyzing client data, offering advanced features that could be difficult for less experienced users to understand. As a user experience designer, I needed to address this by simplifying the interactions required from the Lana Labs Customer Success Team, ensuring a more accessible experience for all users.

• Advocating for the UX design process on a team unaccustomed to working with designers posed a challenge. When I joined the Berlin team, Lana Labs had not yet integrated user experience methodologies into their development process. I had to emphasize the importance of allocating time for the design process within sprints. To address this, I led a series of interactive presentations to explain the UX team’s internal processes and focused on integrating these practices into the team’s daily workflow.

• Designing a tool without existing clients presented a unique challenge. Appian had no prior process mining capabilities, so we were building something from scratch based on our intuition and what we believed would benefit current Appian clients. This required significant effort to define a user flow that would quickly demonstrate the value of the new process mining capabilities and effectively convert new users.

• This project was quite open-ended, making it challenging for our team to commit to a specific direction. I had to focus on pivoting between different ideas to build the tool with the highest quality standards. Success in this area required not only articulating various concepts to evaluate potential directions but also developing persuasive skills to convince Appian executives to support the ideas that my team and I believed were the best.

• We had to deliver an MVP quickly within a three-month timeframe to validate our hypotheses with real users. To meet this deadline, we adopted a one-week sprint cadence, requiring me to hand over the final design versions every week.

To establish a strategy for creating a valuable solution for current low-code users, the team I worked with as a user experience designer was tasked with finding an easy-to-use solution integrated into the existing platform.