Background & Challenge
COOKFOX digital resource library is a company internal database of valuable design assets, it was built and used by design professionals with extensive experiences.
The company plans to leverage the library resource to enhance the productivity of unexperienced young professionals. However, the library is not user-friendly for young professionals due to the experience barrier and its high learn cost, thus it didn't play its role.
Solution & Impacts
The user experience of this digital resource library got reconstructed, so it's not longer just a knowledge pool, but a productivity tool that can streamline young professional's workflow.
Team & Role
- Product Designer (me)
- Product Prototyper (me)
- Digital Resource Committee
- Engineering Team
Impacts
Session length decreased:
47.2%
Time spent on coodination decreased:
63.2%
The problem
Young professionals don't have too much experiences, they are not familiar with different materials in terms of source, application, finish, price, etc. as well as what they are made of and how they actually look and feel like in reality. Meanwhile, they are not familiar with the professional workflow and format, their outputs need to be reviewed multiple times before they can be presented to client.
All these problems need long time of training to mitigate which would be a heavy financial burden for the design company.
So how to leverage the digital resource library to solve this?
Research and findings
To deeply understand the problem problem, we started with understanding target users - young design professionals, and sort out a persona that can represent this group of users.
The target users have clear needs and characteristics, as well as their motivations and characteristics in their daily work, so in order to understand problems they might face in their workflow, we mapped their user journey.
By analyzing the user journey map, there are two main pain points got identified:
Pain Point 1
There are too many content in the library, there are no efficient searching mechanism users can rely on to find the what they exactly need.
Pain Point 2
Documentation is repetitive and tedious work, users might make mistakes due to the lack of concentration during the process.
Then, does the current library solve these two pain points? We conducted a set of comprehensive analysis on current library.
Obviously the answer is no, it doesn't solve two pain points. There are many items need to be improved on user experiences, from the user flow to user interface.
Design goals
Based on the understanding of users' pain points and analysis on the current library, design goals have been sorted out:
1. Set up a effective searching mechanism so critical content can be easily sorted out.
2. Steamline the documentation so it satisfies the company standard and eliminate repetitive works.
Solution for the design goal #1:
1. Improve user flow.
According to the current library analysis, the user flow does not satisfy current users needs. It is more like an actual library, user input keywords or criterial, it lists results. Then user will need to do the rest of work by themselves, recording key info, comparing, shortlisting and documenting.
As a important component of the overall searching experience, a cart feature is added and integrated into the user flow. This feature is able to help users with streamlining final steps of material selection.
2. Improve information architecture and user interface.
Current information architecture and user interface are not helping users with information sorting. All information are equally presented, lack of visual hierarchy leads to poor perception, or even overwhelming; filters got grouped together in order to create a clean visual design, however, it doesn't provide users with clear affordance or signifier.
Improvements include two parts: one is on recognition level, material info are presented in an order of their importance, so users' perception is guided by carefully structured information and visual hierarchy, in terms of portion, size, color of contents; the other one is on the behavior level, the user interface is redesigned to clearly indicates affordances, so users' interaction become intuitive, they can efficiently sort out what they are looking for.
Solution for the design goal #2:
Transforming the library into productivity tool
Documentation is a repetitive work, it follows certain templates, once young designers have done it once, they don't really learn anything new by repeating it. However, it can be a heavy burden if users have to record data and document them manually, since repetitive works and fussy templates can cause distraction and eventually lead to mistakes.
So the best solution is to steamline the whole process from the library output to the design documents.
All documentation templates are stored in the application for users to choose from depending on different projects they are working on, it layouts materials materials accordingly and allows certain levels of adjustments. While if selected materials got changed, the document will update automatically.
The library optimization end up working well, we evaluated the impact from two perspective.
One is users actual experience when they are using the library. According to interviews we conducted and the user journey map based on that, the optimization does improve the overall experience significantly, the curve stay stably at good level.
The other is data and success metrics, the library shows much better performance in many metrics, especially the session length which measures average time spent on material sorting and documentation, it got decreased 47.2% which reflects a huge improvement on efficiency; and time spent on coordination, which includes working session, meetings, rounds of reviews, got decreased by 63.2%, that means sizable saving on working hours and label cost.
