Overview
Background
Alfresco is a commercial, open source software company that specialises in document and information management solutions. The companies leadership had concluded that the methods they had used to develop products in the past were resulting in products with poor user experiences. With market competition on the rise they set up a new team of consultants, located separately from the core business, and which were free to experiment and define its working practices without the shackles of the core companies standard policies and processes.
Challenges
There were a few false starts before I joined the project, and on arrival as Lead UX Designer, I inherited a product as that had been in development for several months from a previous design lead. On examining the design, I concluded that there had been a lack of research on how companies and their staff currently work and how the product would support their processes. Design decisions to date had been based frequently on vague assumptions, and I felt the product had taken the wrong direction.
Responsibilities
Responsible for overall design direction and methodology, leading of design team members, support of team recruitment, and a broad spectrum of UX related disciplines including hands-on:
• Product management deputy.
• Qualitative User Research.
• Quantitative survey design and analysis.
• Ideation and conceptualisation.
• Specifications contained medium fidelity wireframes, user journeys, storyboards, site maps.
• Acceptance test criteria (Gherkin Syntax).
• Product management deputy.
• Qualitative User Research.
• Quantitative survey design and analysis.
• Ideation and conceptualisation.
• Specifications contained medium fidelity wireframes, user journeys, storyboards, site maps.
• Acceptance test criteria (Gherkin Syntax).
Key achievements
• Persuading senior management to invest first-degree user research including Ethnographic Field Studies, User Interviews, Task Analysis, and Guerrilla testing, in Chicago, Washington DC and Atlanta. Findings were central to a pivot occurring in the product direction and strategy.
• Persuading Alfresco to allow the designers and researchers a chance to lead the direction of the product in collaboration with the development team. The result was a far more efficient process to learn and design the right solutions by utilizing rapid prototyping and research before developing solutions at great expense and effort.
• Persuading Alfresco to allow the designers and researchers a chance to lead the direction of the product in collaboration with the development team. The result was a far more efficient process to learn and design the right solutions by utilizing rapid prototyping and research before developing solutions at great expense and effort.
Research
Background
When I arrived on the project, a number of key assumptions already made by Developers regarding who our future users were, and how they performed their work. Some senior members of the team were unwilling to reevaluate these assumptions unless there was good reason to do so. I organised to visit an early adopter client in Chicago to learn more about how they create and manage contracts within their business. I also interviewed interested parties at Federal Government trade show in Washington D.C.
Goals
• Draft business processes and task flows.
• Identify organizational structure & key user role types.
• Summarise current pain points.
• Collate known & estimated cost of pain points (Time, effort and risks).
• Identify initial opportunities for improvement.
• Identify organizational structure & key user role types.
• Summarise current pain points.
• Collate known & estimated cost of pain points (Time, effort and risks).
• Identify initial opportunities for improvement.
Outcome
• Alfresco had underestimated the complexity of the contract creation, and management process and the existing understood process would be insufficient.
• Guerrilla usability testing proved that overall UI Design, layouts, and icons, were understood by the users. However, the process that it supported were not aligned with the business process.
• Findings were central to a pivot occurring in the product direction and strategy.
• Guerrilla usability testing proved that overall UI Design, layouts, and icons, were understood by the users. However, the process that it supported were not aligned with the business process.
• Findings were central to a pivot occurring in the product direction and strategy.
this method assisted us to quickly establish current business processes and task flows,
and even revealed processes and issues the customer was not currently aware of.
Those processes were then digitised using Visio
There was also time to guerrilla test some existing concepts and prototypes with members of staff to validate if they were intuitive and engaging.
Ideation
Ideation sessions were then carried out by myself and the UX team exploring how to solve some of the learnt issues and exploit new opportunities.
Ideation for a Contract Management mobile application to enable sales staff to access key information when offsite.
Mobile application navigational ideation explored the notion of cards and stacks for a modern, engaging experience.
Repositories of content required to be organised and navigable via a number of different contexts.
Exploration into case event history revealed potential in actually intelligently predicting and notifying the user of future events.
Conceptual work into application wide search led to many questions being raised around the vast number of searchable objects, and type ahead prediction of queries verses search results. We explored the feasibility of displaying a number of different notions all at once.
Search Interaction Design
Interactive Prototype
High fidelity
