NEWTONX
Increasing productivity by decreasing lag time
The Client Delivery team had trouble remembering to close out completed projects, which put a lot of strain on our database. As a result, the whole product started to slow down, and loading times increased. This made it harder for the team to be productive and left them with less time to work on other projects.
ROLE
Product Designer
YEAR
2023
TEAM
Product Manager
Development Lead
DELIVERABLES
Usability Testing
Wireframes
High Fidelity Designs
GOAL
Increase number of closed projects.
Finding the why
While the project seemed to have a solid foundation and understanding of its goal, the "why" behind it still appeared unclear. In order to gain more clarity, I engaged in discussions with my product manager to gather additional context and revisited notes from past user interviews with associates. Eventually, I was able to identify the primary reasons why projects were not being closed.
Currently, there are two ways to close a project: through the project details or via the project settings. However, both methods necessitate navigating into the project itself, which could take several minutes due to excessive loading times. When working on potential designs, my primary goal was to address the issue of forgetfulness among users while providing them with a faster way to close projects that wouldn't be affected by lag times.
Closing a project through the project detail.Closing a project through the project settings.Time to test
I had done a handful of sketches for some ideas of what we could do and chose two to move forward with. I put them in a higher fidelity as the flow was similar, but the majority of the heavy lifting was through visual design like color and component style. When I met with our product manager and developer, we found ourselves with differing viewpoints on which to proceed with. While the manager and developer advocated for the first design, I championed the second design as a more intuitive solution, addressing a key pain point. The second design, in my perspective, introduced a heightened sense of urgency, directly addressing the primary issue of forgetfulness. Furthermore, the first design could potentially be misconstrued as a tag or label, lacking clarity as an interactive component.
Since we encountered some challenges in making a decision, I decided to conduct interviews with four associates, combining A/B testing and Usability Testing. Each associate was given the same prompt to interact with both designs, and we carefully observed the results.
In the first design, only 1 out of 4 users clicked on the component to close the project. However, in the second design, 3 out of 4 users immediately clicked on the button to close the project. This valuable feedback helped us gain insights and make a more informed choice moving forward.
Conclusion
After analyzing the test data, we made the decision to move forward with the second design. The "close project" button would only be visible on projects that had exceeded a certain time period from their launch. Our aim was to use this button as both a reminder and a quick way to close projects, in hopes of increasing the number of closed projects and reducing loading times.
We successfully rolled out the change to all users. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to directly witness the impact my designs had on the product. To assess the effectiveness of the new design, I would have monitored specific metrics such as the increase in closed projects and the tracking of load times to see if they decreased.
Looking back, there are a few things I would have done differently. Firstly, I would have advocated more strongly for the second design during the decision-making process, as it would have allowed us to implement and collect data more rapidly, which is crucial in a startup environment. Additionally, in terms of user research, I would have opted for a dedicated usability test focused on the second design rather than blending multiple research methods. This approach would have provided more credibility to my designs and delivered more accurate data for making informed decisions. Lastly, I would have looked more at our design system to see existing patterns while also doing more competitive analysis.