Alteryx provides enterprise tools for business analysts to automate data preparation and analysis without code. Over decades, Alteryx accumulated fragmented tools that don’t share the same mental model and operate in different ecosystems. Alteryx One emerged as the business strategy to consolidate all offerings into a holistic experience to improve adoption. This project is to design the new consolidated experience from zero to one.
My role
Team Lead, Architect
Worked with
2 designers, 1 researcher, 1 PM director & 2 tech leads
Time
6 month, 2025
The problem
Fragmented tools in different ecosystem result in poor adoption.
Alteryx Analytics cloud has a few cloud apps sitting on top of a platform, whereas Alteryx Designer is a desktop app for local data processing. Legacy customers on Designer don’t know how to use cloud, and new cloud users don’t take advantage of the power of Designer.
The vision
One app to rule them all.
The business directive is to have one desktop application to contain all apps and shared platform features.
The design challenge
How to structure this app to host all existing highly disparated features?
At its core, this is an IA problem. A well designed IA should meet users’ natural workflow.
The research and insights
We learned that users think in terms of files, not apps. Thus the new IA should make
I dug into the past research and constructed job-to-be-done mapping that reflects how users work with Alteryx offerings to accomplish their data jobs.
Key solution #1
“Projects” to empower users to keep files of the same data task organized.
The long-term north star design vision introduces a new concept called “Projects”. Each project contains any number of file of any type that fulfills the same data job, along side with all the datasets used for this job. This is grounded in the insight that users rely on multiple different types of files for one data task.
Key solution #2
Using tabs for opened files, and consolidate file organization and platform features
Inspired by Figma, Alteryx One users have a similar workflow. They need a place to create and retrieve files, but they spend most of the time in different files. In addition, Alteryx One users need easy access to platform features. Platform features and file browsing are grouped into the same space, since they are both in support of non-editing tasks.
Testing & iteration
We learned that users think in terms of files, not apps. Thus the new IA should make
I dug into the past research and constructed job-to-be-done mapping that reflects how users work with Alteryx offerings to accomplish their data jobs.
Scale back to MVP without side stepping
We learned that users think in terms of files, not apps. Thus the new IA should make
I dug into the past research and constructed job-to-be-done mapping that reflects how users work with Alteryx offerings to accomplish their data jobs.
Scale back to MVP without side stepping
We learned that users think in terms of files, not apps. Thus the new IA should make
I dug into the past research and constructed job-to-be-done mapping that reflects how users work with Alteryx offerings to accomplish their data jobs.
