Another proprietary ECO product is getting sunsetted. The ask is migrate the users and the feature parity to Sightline. The migration efforts include the redesign of the UI into Sightline UI, redesign the UX flow into the standard Collection flow of the eDiscovery platform, and UX improvements overall.
Deepdive into the end-to-end flow of the sunsetted ECA platform gave us framing of what can be improved and discovery of gaps that need to be addressed to convert the ECA feature into the standard eDiscovery Colleciton feature. We cross-functioned with the ECA and Sightline product management team to gather the feature and business requirements and scope of work.
We mainly work on the base foundational framework of the sunsetted ECA product. Competitive analysis mostly obrserver to explore variations of UI treatment. To be cost efficient, existing components in the UI library are used. An internal product team reviewed and participated in the A/B testing of the end-to-end flow; and their feedbacks and the click-through-rates, time spent on each page, and success completion rate are gathered. Based on the gathered data, the designs are furthered interated on. The final output of this step is the final hi-fidelity mockups to be attached to the product requirement documents.
The final mockups and product requirement document are handed off to the engineering team. I switched role to a front-end UI developer hat, where i started the UI work JIRA ticket (dev and QA), created a UI feature branch, and wrote jQuery and CSS to match the design. While i'm writing the UI, the back-end developers would do spike investigation for back-end technical feasibility.
The implementation ran smoothly for the most part. There was a suprise when the back-end developers brought up an issue that is related to a recent user behaviors of attaching linked attachments in their email (which is different that attaching local files in the email). Below is a detailed story of the moment.
The back-end and architecture developers brought up a blocker about a usecase that the product team fail to recognize. During collection of emails, custodians might use a linked attachment that a reviewer or review manager do not have access to the attachment or the cloud-based repository; meanwhile collection needs to collect the necessary ESI. We went back to the sunsetted ECA development team regarding this, they mentioned that this flow breaks the system because they did not solve this problem (they stated that the Office SDK at the end was work-in-progress and missing the admin-related APIs). Fortunately, at the time we worked on this, the Office SDK already released the admin-related APIs. We decided to lock this collection feature to Sightline and M365 Enteprise Account admin, and added the credentials input that can only be accessed by Consilio admin + M365 enterprise account admin, early in the beginning of the experience. See the next picture for details.
Users (from managed service to Consilio-trained clients) show positive reactions to this feature. This is the go-to method for collection for clients with medium and large matters. This feature also allow Sightline to add another core service in the EDRM graph.
