Insights Exploration Experience
Problem Statement: Over four years the Product and Experience Design team for our Commercial Insights product, continuously heard that the process for quickly getting a base understanding of their business across every level was very time consuming and difficult. It required many different rigid and inflexible reports to be run in order to get a base understanding.
Project Goal: Define a new experience that is more flexible, allows users to quickly change their perspective and easily provides an overview of every level of a user’s business.
My Role: I was one of the 2 Lead User Experience designer for this project and I partnered directly with a group of Product Owner stakeholders to define what this experience could be.
Client
84.51˚ LLC
Year
Late 2021 - Mid 2022
Project Kickoff & Concept Definition
This project was a direct opportunity that came out of the product ecosystem thinking research that I did. This was one of the main pain points that we have heard time and time again from our users for our flagship insights product. Because we had heard this over the last four years, we didn’t need to do any up-front research with users to understand the problem space.
We immediately jumped into defining the concept for what this new flexible experience could be. The existing experience was very rigid and linear and required a lot of manual work. The ideal future experience would be flexible and allow for quickly changing perspective.
Sketching
After defining the concept I sketched out potential ideas for how it could come to life. I did a traditional 6 up style where I rapidly drew out 6 different ideas with different themes and ideas I could pull from later in the wireframe phase.
Wireframes & Prototype
After defining the concept I co-designed how the experience would come to life with my other Lead UX designer. We agreed on the flow and I walked through with our User Interface designer on how the wireframes and prototype should come to life. I guided our UI designer with creating the prototype as it was a complex concept and he continued to run into hurdles when understanding it.
Validating the Concept through Research
After creating the wireframes and prototype I lead and facilitated validating the concept with 7 of our CPG clients through 1 hour moderated user research sessions. I wrote the research brief, script and worked with our sales team to find the right clients for the research to validate the concept with.
Research Goal
We wanted to validate the following research goal and questions:
"We want to validate the flexibility and discoverability of a non-linear experience for all users. Does this approach get them the insights they need to do their jobs?"
Research Questions
Does the concept of zooming in and out of insights and different layers make sense?
Does this provide more flexibility to them than what they have today?
How would a user leverage this in their day-to-day work routine?
How this compares to the existing reporting experience?
Findings
Speed of Discoverability
All in one place story building.
Insights build upon each other, don't need to start from scratch each time you want to change perspective.
Rapidly find insights and state of subject area.
Getting started faster.
Flexibility
Changing view of context quickly.
Kroger view & custom views are needed.
Ability to add/edit/drag & drop items in a story.
Adoption
Great place to start analysis. Gets you right into the data to explore and learn.
Onboarding new users or 'green' analysts to get a quick understanding of the health of category/brand/etc.
Easily share story with HQ users or other team members.
Credibility
Need to understand source data that the insights are based on.
Ability to export or download that data set.
Dive in deeper to a report for more granular analysis.
Mockups & Proof of Concept
We had validated that the concept would provide more flexibility and improve the speed at which users could get a base understanding of their business. Next we wanted to create a Proof of Concept (POC) that we could then validate the content of the new experience we had designed. I designed mockups and partnered with our Lead Engineer on the project to bring the POC to life.
POC Validation Learnings
I lead and facilitated the proof of concept validation research with all 7 of the clients that we originally tested the concept with. By revisiting the same users I was able to maintain context with them to validate the content that was most important to them when it comes to getting a base understanding of their business across all levels. I gained a clear vision to provide back to the product and development team on what is most important from a metrics, data visualization, data science, automation and user interaction perspective for our users.
I formulated all of my findings into a few different types of shareouts. One shareout was focused on presenting the learnings and findings directly to the development team and product owner making the decisions. I also created a research summary post on our internal organizations website to capture all of the findings in our research repository. Lastly, I facilitated sharing the learnings in an Inception workshop kickoff to ensure the entire team knew exactly what was most valuable to our users and that they could build the right thing.
