Case Study: Research Center
my role: UX lead, UX research, front end development
Overview/Background
A global management consulting firm required a new self-service research portal that would replace an existing and ineffective tool. They sought a solution that would provide access to contracted data research sources. The ultimate goal was to furnish consultants in the Case and Knowledge Teams with comprehensive professional and industrial data. Anecdotal evidence and a heuristic evaluation demonstrated that there were design, usability and functionality issues with the current tool. Further user research was required to confirm or refute assumptions around user needs and behavior.
Research
Research was conducted remotely and began with user surveys to establish key personas, provide data concerning usage and identify current pain-points. Findings from the survey established a baseline for individual user interviews. Ten participants were questioned over 2 weeks on a variety of topics and given access to two working medium-fidelity prototypes using InVision to facilitate A/B and usability testing. Research demonstrated that users valued discoverability and the ability to customize the tool by bookmarking their preferred sources. During interviews I learned that consultants concentrate on a particular practice area, such as Finance or Healthcare, and that they were provided hundreds of potentially valuable data resources, each with their own areas of focus. However the existing research portal did little to assist consultants in discovering relevant resources so many of them went unused.
Execution
Our team utilized an Agile process for design, development and QA testing, breaking up all work into 2 week sprints. User findings were presented to the client to justify the proposed design direction. Once approved I developed a responsive front end UI for integration into a Sharepoint site back end.
