Automating
industrial workflows
My role
UX researcher and designer in a team of three
Goals
1. Develop research strategy
2. Improve product usabilityTimeline
4 months
UX researcher and designer in a team of three
1. Develop research strategy
2. Improve product usability
4 months
A startup client wanted to scale their process automation SaaS product and improve usability along the way. The product was aimed at B2B clients in the specialty chemical industry.
Due to NDA limitations, I'm only sharing limited information.
In a team of three at Alpha Design Studio, I was in charge of user research, journey mapping, information architecture, prototyping, and creating customer support guidelines.
Working alongside the product lead (Milovan Jovičić) and senior designer (Andrija Jonić), I collaborated with client’s executive, product, engineering, and support teams.
Our team set out to discover usability issues. A good way for us to hear directly from users was to review user onboarding sessions conducted by the client's customer support team.
During the review, not many issues came up. This seemed to happen because the support team needed to strike a delicate balance between onboarding users and gathering feedback. It was a challenge for them, as well as for users, who were often reluctant to bring up issues openly.
We shifted gears and tried to help the client gather better feedback.
I shared our findings with the client and presented a few guidelines to help the support team navigate user onboarding sessions. The idea was to help the client take the next (minimum viable) step forward, until they have the resources for bigger research efforts.
Snippet of the guidelines aiming to make users feel comfortable to share feedback
Working closely with the senior designer and product lead, I gathered internal feedback and relied on heuristics to solve usability issues and introduce new features.
Taking a step back from the UI and re-evaluating information architecture, I discovered a few interaction issues that we were able to solve. We iterated on designs weekly, creating high-fidelity prototypes to encourage actionable feedback from the client’s team.
In a spirit of MVP progress, my team helped the client improve their research efforts and tackle a few critical usability issues as the client scaled the product to the next stage.
The project was completed when the client transitioned to hiring an in-house design team.
I witness yet again that good enough beats perfect every time—especially in fast growing teams. Sometimes decisions need to be made based on informed guesses and that's ok.
Creating a research team can take time, but I learned that we can take one step at a time in the right direction, and rely on minimum viable feedback and heuristics.
