My work at Thomson Reuters is a fun and interesting mix of internal tools used by employees and external facing products like Westlaw.
My workdays are usually spent in meetings with business and tech working to find design solutions that balance their needs with the needs of the people who will be using the products, wireframing and designing, and working through solutions with teammates.
Below is a look at the project I’ve been most involved in, which is an internal facing product that focuses on how content gets acquired, sorted, and then funneled into the different areas of Thomson Reuters as well as to the external products it supports.
For the last year I’ve been working on a project that focuses on how content gets brought into Thomson Reuters and then how it gets sorted to all the different places it needs to end up. That is a really high level explanation of the project and in reality it looks more like an octopus with many, many arms or a blob of spaghetti than one straight line from acquiring the content to it’s final resting place. I drew the picture above when I was asked to create on-boarding materials for the project and we didn’t have a visual to help describe what it was. The tangle of different service tunnels started as a joke, but turned out to be pretty accurate since there’s really no firm pattern for how they interact with each other. The main part of my job has been to make sure that the different services/“octopus arms” have what they need. That usually takes the form of weekly meetings with business and developers for the services, wire framing solutions, and also working closely with accessibility team members to make sure that the solutions work for everyone. Additionally, there have been new services added throughout the year that have involved workshops and new teams.
Below is a peek at some quick sketches from my notebook.
This project is probably the most complex one I’ve worked on just since the project/system itself has so many moving pieces. It’s also been incredibly rewarding. Working through problems with developers, hearing directly from the people who will use the tool (especially the coveted, “Oh wow, that feature will make my job so much easier”) is really nice, and getting to work with so many different people has made it a really great project to be a part of.