Project Details
Requirement
A company that offers products and services in food, facilities and uniform to clients in various fields such as- education, healthcare, business and more. The company wants to work around to build an intuitive user centric solution with strategic thinking for business users of the web portal, main focus area being the B2B sector. The ask is to define functional layouts that constitute the structural integrity of all the interfaces to optimise and analyse statistical sales data to suggest the key performance indicators, best pricing for products, analyse their competitors in the market and relevant suggestions which will help them drive up their overall revenue.
Business Goal
With aggressive competition, every company is very particular to understand if they have their business strategies right and they want to learn as much as possible about the areas where they need to improve. The business wants a digital dashboard like interface through which the B2B channel can visually get an idea of how well they fare in the market. The company wants all the modules of the business to visually represent its data systematically to make it easy to understand and build upon their business scope.
Exploration
Users of the Product
Data Scientists, Data Researchers, Analytical Team, and Stakeholders fall into the bucket of important users. Of all the humongous data available it is very difficult for the company to sort and distribute the data to its fellow data scientists, data researchers and analytical team for them to work upon. Immense stress gets built on these data scientists to inspect and validate the voluminous data to come up with the right selling key prices for their own products. Looking through several spreadsheet columns and sheets gets very tedious and allows for quite a big margin for human errors to occur. The data scientists need to read through several pages of numbers in extremely large quantities with small size fonts, leading to eye soreness and eye problems. It also increases mental and overall stress levels.
Recalibrating the Users
The data scientists, data researchers and the analytical processing team use the interface to input and analyse the generated data, which brings about the critical decisions impacting the business. On the other hand, this data holds reference for the stakeholders to understand their lineup in the competitive market with real valuable data.
Research
To understand the problem statement better, I started out with good amount of research on how data scientists read and analyse information, the amount of focus needed visually for the representation of Key Performance Indicators, how to contribute to the solution so it can impact and influence the overall business. It gave me a foundation to understand and start transformational design solutions for the existing logical sequences.
Considering the functional coupling of the project, quantitative approach (surveys and questionnaires) was the best. It was seen as the most efficient and the quickest possible way to collect information from the users who apparently are also the team members of the project. In a scenario like this, the challenge was not only the time but also the availability of the users, because in a project team as big as this, many software processes run in parallel and all the users are pre-occupied with tasks, therefore surveys and questionnaires proves to be handy for a quick understanding of the users.
Design Process
Every alternate day, a survey was sent out to the target users as a part of requirement elicitation. Considering the many interfaces to be designed, the surveys were rolled out concept wise, goal oriented, questions kept simple, and less time consuming to complete. This kind of surveys happened in iterative cycles and the required information was collected before starting the design processes. Several sessions of peer-to-peer discussions were conducted with the analytical team to understand what aspects in the task flow were problematic and needed enhancement keeping focus on user experience. Further, the initial wireframes for the primary module were designed and circulated for discussions. Post the discussions and reviews, the design theme was extended to complete the wireframes for the other modules.
Solution
My Role
I worked alongside the stakeholders and was responsible for the end to end design solution of the project. I was responsible to perform the initial heuristic evaluation of the existing site, complete research on the domain with market analysis and understand the overall architecture and navigational flow of the interfaces to rebuild the Information Architecture. In order to achieve the apt design solution, my role needed me to cross-skill and collaborate among multiple analytics and development teams and compile all possible information. I took responsibility for the UX research, sketches, user journeys, brainstorming, wireframes, and other deliverables relevant to the design process.
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Result
The design solution put in place boosted the effectiveness of the company’s ability to engage itself in an effective counter marketing strategy amongst its competitors. The information flows and visual representation of information made it more comprehensible for all the stakeholders and primary users to derive valuable decisions that aid the overall business.