Portfolio

Workplace Tools UX Research, Design and Testing

• Products name: Wrokplace Tools
• Devices: Web
• My Role: UX research (qualitative and quantitative), UX Writing (co-op), UX Design (co-op), Post Launch Testing
• Teams involved: Product Designers, Customer Support and Account Managers, Back-end Payments Specialists, Front-end Developers, Project Management
• Stakeholders: Internal (company employees)
• Tools: Figma, Miro, Jira, Microsoft Suite

Challenges

The main task was to update an internal tool used by various teams. The tool operated in three separate windows, with large amounts of data shown in each, with no customization possible. This resulted in cluttering and cognitive overload.

It was also important to reduce about 40% of the content shown with the tool that was rarely used by employees nor required by any current company’s processes.

An overhaul of the features and how they were linked was direly due. Employees often reported problems with navigation, flow, and lack of intuitiveness of the layout and IA.

Pain Points

The tool showed too much info, to the wrong team members. Most of the content was of barely any importance, and got in the way of a productive workflow. Analyzing what content would be useful and what could be hidden in other windows, would be the biggest point to early address.

There were a few pop-ups that the tool generated that were obtrusive and obscured necessary info. Employees wanted a way to delay, or remove, those pop-ups, and address the barely readable font size that was the unmodifiable default of the tool. A lack of contrast in color choices caused further employees’ complaints, and an optimization of the color palette was urgent.

The Process

The research for the redesign included representatives from every team using the original version of the tool. Diary studies were used to collect the majority of the data, with frequent support through interviews and focus groups. The UX teams involved received thus the qualitative and quantitative data to create Problem Statements, User Personas, and User Journeys.

Given the scale of the redesign, multiple designers and teams were gathered together to collaborate. The design process was divided according to pages and employees’ needs. The Design System was update by the UX teams, sketching shortly followed it.

I prototyped the UI elements for the new design, giving the actual design of them to a colleague graphic designer. With these ready, a draft of the design was developed, and live tested with the relevant pool of teams, collecting their feedback on the spot.

Further A/B testing, usability testing, first-click testing, and diary studies were performed on the pool of teams representatives. From their results new elements such as tooltips, dropdown menus, sidebars, were designed and integrated in the draft design. With multitasking in mind, the design was retouched in multiple iterations over the span of many months.

The final design was produced with multiple adjustments in mind to be applied after launch, in order to address future issues caused by changes in features shown and overall flow.

Solution

The new tool delivered was moved to a different cloud provider. Each team had now the possibility to request different levels of permissions and have the layout automatically adapted to reflect this. The tool no longer worked by default in three separate windows and could now work in a single one, vastly improving its screen space usage.

All the unnecessary content and functions in the UI were removed, all the UI elements updated for better accessibility, tooltips added only when needed, and the workflow of the new tool designed to be more intuitive and consistent.