Role: UX Design
Design Team size: 4 UX designers, .5 Content design, 1 Design Research, 1 UX Engineer & 1 Data scientist
Time on project: May 2021 - present
Areas of ownership: Product integrations, Information architecture, design partnerships.
Product evaluation
What do our qualitative & quantitative data tell us about our current product experience and how can design heuristics aid in charting a path forward to grow our offering while remedying known problem spaces?
Experience analysis
When starting work on a new product a designer is in a unique position of having the expertise to pinpoint and diagnose user issues without the added contextual baggage that can come from working very intimately with a product. It’s a limited state that the new designer has not yet created mental models that align to the product and is a great opportunity to identify opportunities that may otherwise have been dismissed or put out of focus due to the nature of product work.
In my initial walkthrough I collected observational notes which then guided me to different methods of analysis. The key thing I wanted to capture was the value coming through to the user and cognitive ergonomic misalignments for our users. I used the kano analysis framework to summarize key stages in the experience. This gives a more directive view at which areas may be causing us the most friction or contributing the most to user satisfaction. I collected our qualitative user research, and tried to compare it to some of the established telemetry. This view allowed me to observe areas needing attention from different perspectives and also shone a light on some gaps in telemetry.
Applied learning
Expanding user experience telemetry
While synthesizing data I observed a high level of customer lifecycle data and engineering performance data. When trying to drill into our usage and experience telemetry however there was very little to be found. I worked with engineering and a newly appointed experience analytics specialist to start implementing a first run experience user funnel.
Sketching different opportunities for UX driven telemetry
Re-focusing on the user
There was a lot of disconnect in matching the product’s requirements to the users ability. Much of this was waved off by saying the customer would simply find a more technical team member to use the product. This severely narrows the usage funnel and does not allow the product to deliver value to the business users who would benefit from the service.
By holding an open discussion across research, our sales team, product managers and designers we were able to concretize our goals in lowering the barrier to entry for the product. With this mapped out we have been able to move forward on common ground and align our efforts towards a common goal of centering the typical business user in our product development.
Addressing the cognitive load
The main barriers I observed in the current experience were around the user’s cognitive load. Our experience had high levels of jargon, little visual hierarchy and many things asked of the user at once. My recommendations included focusing on the key task, simplifying the language and providing more stepped guidance.
A screenshot of the current experience for labeling and training extractors.
My proposal based on my evaluation.
Next steps
With these recomendations in place to hit our usability goals for 2022 I am now working with the GPM to design our vision for 2023.