GoData
2019
GoData is an enterprise search solution that enables users to search through millions of documents
The client has millions of valuable and confidential documents stored in 40+ servers around the world. The employees of the organisation depend heavily on these documents to enable their day-to-day work.
GoData enables users to search through millions of documents stored in different server locations around the world.
Skills
Research
UX & UI
Prototyping
Industry
Financial Services
Scope of work and timeline
The project started with research through mixed methods followed by defining the user-experience of the platform and translating into a user-interface design
Discovery
Research Analysis
User Experience
User Interface
Discovery
While re-designing the GoData platform, we wanted to discover the business and user needs. We also focussed on finding current challenges, pain-points and motivations for the existing users
15
30+
60+
User Interviews Conducted
Insights
discovered
Painpoints discovered
What we knew
Business benefits
1. Saves time of the employees and hence cost for the business.
2. Enables employees to be more productive.
3. Enables knowledge sharing throughout the organisation.
4. Help in breaking silos around the data from different regions and create an open culture.
5. Empower business to learn from the past and make better future decisions.
User benefits
1. Reduce the time and energy spent to find documents.
2. Eliminates the process of calling people to ask for the right documents.
3. Reduce the need for remembering document location.
4. Ensures that the user has the latest information at hand.
5. Focus on more valuable and productive tasks.
User Journey
I utilised a user-journey as a way to represent the insights and pain-points gathered from the user-interviews.
Research Analysis
Analysing the primary and secondary research to create persona of the target audiences motivations, pain-points and jobs to be done.
Persona
Understanding Insights
01
Usability issues
There were several issues on the usability front of the platform due to which a lot of users did not like to use the platform as often as they would need to.
This resulted in them using the manual methods to find a document and sometimes giving up.
02
Trust issues
Trusted seemed to be common theme among major pain-points derived from the user-interviews.
The lack of trust due to few bad past experiences earned the platform a bad name among several teams.
03
Poor roll-out strategy
We found out that the product roll-out strategy was not defined and was left to the local teams for their region. Hence we save some regions that used the platform heavily while many lagged behind.
04
Outdated data
It came out that data was synchronised on a weekly basis which was too long for the users. The users wanted real-time index of their data onto the platform.
Seeing outdated data eroded the trust of the users and rendered the platform unusable by many users.
05
Clunky user experience
During our interview, most of the users called the product experience to be clunky for various reasons. Due to the bad user experience many stopped using the product after a few trials.
The majority of the issues were attributed to unintuitive interface, slow performance and plethora of error messages.
06
Adoption issues
We discovered a lot of adoption challenges due to unwillingness to move to a new system.
Our target users were aged between 40 to 55 years old and the product was not designed keeping in mind the technology adoption of these users.
User Experience
We defined the experience themes for the product which served as the pillars for product, design and development teams
Experience Themes
01
Building trust
Gaining trust of the users became a central theme in the whole redesign project since many challenges revolved around it.
02
User delight
Bad usability and user-experience needed to be replaced by user delight in order to improve adoption and increase repeat users.
03
Assistive design
Since our target users were between 40 to 55 years old and not tech savvy, we wanted to build a design that provided assistance at every step.
04
Accessibility
Keeping the target users in mind, accessibility became a key pillar for our designs.
05
Smart and automated
Users want some of the processes to be automated and should not require their intervention. This would not only save time but also remove friction in using GoData.
06
Strategic roll-out
A central strategy to roll-out the new product in different regions to create a seamless experience and providing support to local teams.
Information Architecture
User Interface
Creating a visual language for the mobile app and converting key screens into clickable prototype.
Wireframes
The emphasis was on converting the discovered pain-points into solutions that can be quickly prototyped and tested with the users.
I used Adobe XD to create clickable prototypes which were then tested and iterated through user feedback.
UI Components
I like to use atomic-design approach. Creating components help developers to start their work without waiting for individual screens. It ensures consistency and re-usability to save time in design and development.
12 column bootstrap grid was chosen to give flexibility for creating a responsive website in the future.
Crafting Interactions
I emphasise on creating the details for each and every scenario that would happen between the user and the system.
I create multiple states for each component on a screen to make sure every single interaction is crafted.
Simplified and intuitive interface
Moving away from the clunky experience and creating a cleaner search UI with important features upfront helped users with reduced cognitive load.
Search results displaying the key metadata that helps users to spot the right document became a fruitful decision based on the user-testing.
Guided experience
Keeping the users informed in all the situations and guiding towards next steps helped users with delightful experience and avoid wrong turns.
Improving the UX copy and providing better messages also helped users in being informed and understand the context better.
Active listening
We introduced active feedback loops to hear directly from our users about their experience of using the product. This helped us to improve the product and also build our backlog based on new requests from users.
We also included a reporting system whenever users spotted a bug or something did not work as per their expectations. This helped us for quicker redressal of the issues and increased user satisfaction
Impact
We saw a jump in the adoption of product across regions. In post launch user testing we witnessed a growth in trust and significantly reduced apprehensions among the users.
We also saw rise in word of mouth marketing of our product which acted as a catalyst in user adoption and improving the image of the product among different groups.
Learnings
From this project I learnt the importance of demographic and their role in design. The research also helped me to understand that the success of product lies with great design, engineering and strategy combined.
The learning was not limited to design. I also learnt the importance of capturing metrics and data driven design. Working closely with engineers gave me a good understanding of both front-end and back-end technologies.
Outcomes
The outcome of the project was a redesigned user-experience that kept user at the centre.
© Shubham Khatkar 2024