Over the course of the discovery and design phase we used different visualization methods to help us gain a better understanding of our users and the product workflow as a whole. We’ve created user profiles, workflow maps, and wireframes to help us build a better and more user-centric platform.
Defining our users
We started by sorting our users into different levels of engagement depending on what types of services they’re looking to receive. This step gave us a better understanding of the types of expectations and actions each user will face when on the platform.
User workflows
Creating user workflows was an opportunity to step back and map the user’s experience from end-to-end. This process helps us identify the major interaction points a user has with the platform. Looking at the map, we were also able to assess overall goals and accomplishments for different users and that led us to prioritize functionalities we should start wireframing.
Wireframing
After mapping out our big-picture user workflows, we then started to wireframe the functions we had prioritized in the last round. Wireframes are usually architectural blueprints of an application. They help us focus on more granular user interactions, while giving us room to experiment without locking us into one design direction.
The first set of wireframes was a storyboard of frames that showed main concepts we were trying to outline. From there, we broke down each main concept with more detailed wireframes to tell a more complete story.
The overall process has led us to create a tool that meets the needs of users with various levels of mapping experience. Users have the ability to complete several workflows, from exploring and processing single-scene imagery to more complicated workflows like setting up workspaces that monitor and process their areas of interest.
User testing
Once the platform is implemented, it’s important that we test what we’ve built with real users and review analytics so that we can prove or disprove the assumptions we have made along the way. User testing is an opportunity to gain feedback on some of the pain points of the platform and why it’s an issue for users. The feedback acquired will give us a better understanding on how to build and improve the product so that it becomes an optimal tool for its target users.
As we’re testing, we should be looking for how our users are interacting with the platform. Some of the areas we should be monitoring include:
- Measuring the user’s attitude and satisfaction level through the platform
- Level of engagement by how frequently the user returns and the
- Level of use through the platform
- Measure how long it takes someone to finish a complete task
- The retention rate and asking how likely a user is to return to the site based on their first visit
Some of the questions should connect back to the key goals we had set in our workflows at the beginning of the process. It's important to understand if our users are able to meet our initial goals and to do that we need to measure how well our users move through some of the key workflows set.
Overall, getting user feedback is critical to the success of a product. Without knowing how our users are experiencing the tool, our way of improving the product can be limited by our own assumptions.