Role: UX design lead
Timeline: 10 months (in 3x phases)
Team: User researcher, Product manager, 2x Front-end developers, 3x Back-end developers
What is 'Projects'?
Project Hub: Better Organization and Teamwork
The new Project Hub helps our customers stay organized by keeping all project files and information in one place. Instead of searching through scattered documents, everyone can find what they need quickly and know they're looking at the most current version.
Teams Feature: Secure Collaboration
The Teams feature lets you create groups within your company and invite other organizations to join your project. You control who can see and edit what information. This means developers, city staff, consultants, and other partners can work together securely on the same project.
Key goals:
• Allow users to store project files in one organised location
• Allow teams to all work on the same up-to-date documents
• Send automatic notifications when changes are made
• Allow multiple people to contribute simultaneously
• Provide secure sharing between different organisations
This streamlined approach reduces confusion, improves communication, and helps projects move forward more efficiently.
The Problems
• The planning industry is lacking in good collaboration tools; in turn this is having a huge impact on delay of approvals. We received $1m funding from the government to try and improve inter-team collaboration
• Analytics revealed our users are only saving an average of 2 sites per year but viewing 52.
• Analytics revealed our users are only saving an average of 2 sites per year but viewing 52.
• User feedback stated people are uncomfortable sharing work files incase someone saves over it or makes irreversible changes; issues of trust.
• 12 users reported using 'screenshots' to save their work; indicates a need for saving, downloading or presentations.
• Same site often being saved multiple times as user has lost track of it
Research & testing plans
Competitor research
Review of our competitors product offerings was undertaken, as well as best practise research on file management tools and collaboration tools such as Microsoft Office, Google Drive, Monday and Trello. This was documented in sections: collaborative working, projects & teams, file management.
Setting out testing structure
As this is such a large, complex and new build, we decided to breakdown our Beta release into phases:
3 phases over 3 months to a limited group of customers (12 users, different industries)
Phase 1 (January):
Phase 2 (February)
Phase 3 (March)
Each phase will involve:
Beta release - Beta user acceptance testing - General release - General user acceptance testing
Beta release - Beta user acceptance testing - General release - General user acceptance testing
Design ideation
Internal workshop
With our team of 20, I ran a design workshop including a crazy 8s exercise, concept refinement, clustering ideas into themes and dot voting. This allowed us to consider multiple routes and identify our key opportunities. The best ideas included visual indicates of when others are viewing a file you are in, notifying users when a file you own is edited and being able to invite users from other organisations to a project team.
External workshops
I took the strongest ideas from our workshop and drafted lo-fi wireframes to carry through into concept testing with our GIS student users. From these workshops, we were able to define our MVP user flow.
Defining the MVP
From initial testing, we could identify the key project requirements that we could distill into MVP requirements.
MVP requirements
• Allow users to create, name, and manage multiple projects for easy organization and navigation.
• Create a user-friendly interface with a clean layout and easy-to-navigate menus.
• Allow users to control the visibility of their project data, granting different levels of access to collaborators.
• Implement user roles and permissions to ensure that only authorized users can access, modify, or delete project data.
• Design the tool to handle a growing number of projects, users, and files without sacrificing performance.
• Create a user-friendly interface with a clean layout and easy-to-navigate menus.
• Allow users to control the visibility of their project data, granting different levels of access to collaborators.
• Implement user roles and permissions to ensure that only authorized users can access, modify, or delete project data.
• Design the tool to handle a growing number of projects, users, and files without sacrificing performance.
I created our basic site map to outline how the new features would connect to our existing tools.
User testing
Concept testing was conducted with our 12 test users using mid-fi prototypes. Insights were clustered and pain points addressed.
• Users found the new navigation bar confusing; this tool grouping did not make sense to them. 67% of users clicked the projects menu when looking for Explore tool.
• Confusion over collaborative working; concerns still on saving over others files. We need to find ways to build trust or users won't use these features.
• Positive feedback on interface for projects and concept of 'Teams'
Following design amends and creating of a hi-fi prototype, we ran an unmoderated test in Useberry to test some concepts that were identified as potentially challenging during our user tests.
We used 20 testers in the house building industry.
This was specifically around the idea of working on files as part of a team:• Do users understand when someone else is working on a file?
• Do they understand the options available to them?
• Is this process smooth and pain free?
• Do they understand the options available to them?
• Is this process smooth and pain free?
I then created our final designs, which we released in stages to our Beta users and conducted user acceptance testing. Feedback so far from users has been very positive!
Project learnings & next steps
• As a team we improved our agile workflow throughout this project; due to the scope creep, timing complications and general project complexity it was crucial to break work into sprints & create a structure release schedule.
• We ran an comprehensive accessibility audit before release; this helped sharped up our accessible design and build standards
• We will run a further round of testing 3 months after wider group release & continue iterating the designs.
• We ran an comprehensive accessibility audit before release; this helped sharped up our accessible design and build standards
• We will run a further round of testing 3 months after wider group release & continue iterating the designs.