Redesigning a School Website
The challenge in any UX project is to provide a positive product/service experience to users without compromising business goals and branding.
I redesigned a tertiary institution's website to address the needs and pain points of persona-in-study, an alumni, of not being able to find sufficient information on relevant continuing education courses to help further advance his career opportunities. My redesign provided more comprehensive information on course description, learning outcomes, costs, financial aids available, class schedule, and faculty background, plus additional relevant information such as childcare facilities and alumni support, based on persona's needs.
Careful thought went into how the school's objectives and branding could be incorporated in the process. Its mission of providing lifelong education to equip learners to serve society was maintained and emphasised in appropriate areas.
Streamlined Information Architecture (IA)
I consolidated the school's revised data structure into fewer informational levels (not more than four) as per user inputs from our project group's collaborative card-sorting and tree-jack survey efforts to reach the desired course details page more efficiently.
The challenge here was for us, as a group and individually, to validate and reconcile inconsistent findings from these surveys with the best fit that best met all the needs and resolved all the pain points of the persona according to their experience instead of what we thought was right for them.
Simplified User Navigational Flow
The consolidated data structure led me to simplify the user workflow which allowed users to locate the necessary information easily, as compared to the scattered information found in our heuristic (usage) analysis on the original website.
The user flow coverage above incorporated the processes of checking for appropriate financial aids which were available for the persona, looking up on childcare facilities on campus, as well as additional support the alumni could provide for the persona, who was a working parent. These information types were differentiated by different colour codes in both the revised IA and user flow.
Revamping Slack Mobile App
User Research Process
With more than 5 million daily active users and more than 60,000 teams around the world using Slack as a collaborative tool (Ref. article here), its users still encountered pain points.
To understand the product, my team and I did a comprehensive heuristic (usage) analysis on Slack, and interviewed users on their behavioural patterns, their needs and pain points in using communication and collaborative tools, before consolidating the feedback in the Affinity Mapping.
Customer Journey Mapping (CJM)
To provide a holistic understanding of the impact these pain points had on users, we journeyed through a day's work in the life of our persona, named Jessica, who needed to get work done more efficiently via Slack.
We studied the tasks in her work process especially where Slack was used (touchpoint) and gained an insight into her experiences, both positive and negative, with the app.
What was improved?
Through the CJM, we identified negative user experiences in Slack's main functionalities when creating group chats, bookmarking messages, and sharing files with the team. So the following improvements were made:
- We removed ambiguous terminologies when user created group chats,
- We made bookmarking messages more efficient by consolidating the workflow, and
- We simplified the file-sharing process which allowed users to share files with ease.
I firmly believe user research not only improves user experience, but it also changes the perspective businesses see in meeting user needs - after getting to know the "jobs to be done" by their products or services for their customers (Ref. HBR Sep'2016 Issue).