Records Documents

Appian’s document management lived in a world of folders—reliable, familiar, but far from efficient. Setup took too long, security was a constant chore, and the approach never tapped into the platform’s most powerful capabilities.

As a lead UX designer for Record Documents, I set out with Product Management and our Solutions consulting team to change that story. We designed a modern, Record Type powered system that made managing documents faster, smarter, and a whole lot less frustrating. The result? A scalable feature that customers actually want to use—complete with built-in security, rich metadata, and future proofed to enable AI-powered search.

For over 20 years, Appian users stored documents in folders. While functional, this approach:

• Required multiple manual steps for creation, organization, and security setup.

• Applied permissions inconsistently, often needing repetitive updates.

• Lacked integration with Appian’s modern record type capabilities.

• Forced users to submit documents before seeing how they would look, increasing upload errors.

Legacy version of managing documents within Appian

Our customers wanted:

• A faster setup process.

• Granular, automated security.

• Better usability with in-context previews and editing.

• Future proofing with integration with AI tools like Smart Search or Document Chat.

I joined the project at the earliest stage, when “Record Documents” was little more than a promising idea to modernize Appian’s document management. Working closely with my product manager, I immersed myself in customer workflows—listening to how they uploaded, secured, and organized documents today, and where they struggled.

From there, I mapped the end-to-end journey for different personas, from administrators setting up document structures to end users uploading files.

Snippet of persona, user flows, and user stories generated throughout project lifecycle

• UX Strategy & Research — Dug into customer workflows, pain points, and “wish list” features by collaborating closely with PM and Solutions teams. We compared Appian’s Document capabilities to external competitors such as Salesforce, Microsoft Power BI

Considerations of data modeleding for records documents

• Interaction Design — Created user flows for defining document record types, managing metadata, and giving users an “instant preview” moment before submission.

• UI Design — Used Appian’s latest patterns (wizard layouts, enhanced headers) for a cleaner, more intuitive upload flow.

• Validation & Iteration: Designed and tested the live document preview interaction that eliminated the need for intermediate submissions.

When Record Documents launched, the transformation was clear across every step of the workflow. What we delivered wasn’t just easier to use—it redefined document handling as a seamless extension of Appian’s data fabric, ready to power any workflow our customers could imagine. The most notable improvements included:

• Setup time slashed — hours down to minutes.

• 40% faster document find-and-attach times.

• Rapid adoption — 70% of new apps switched to the record-type model in 3 months.

But just don’t take my word for it, our customers went above and beyond to express their opinions on the platform change. Take a look at the article from Stefan Helzle - Appian BPM Evangelist at Bechtle.

Stefan Helzle - Appian BPM Evangelist @ Bechtle

This wasn’t just a feature release—it was a paradigm shift in the ways our customers can now build on Appian’s Platform. Record Documents redefines document management in Appian by putting security, usability, and discoverability at the forefront of low/no code application building.

And for me, it’s a perfect example of why I love UX at scale: take something that’s been “just the way it is” for decades, question it, redesign it, and watch it transform how thousands of people work every single day.