April Yang
I am a UX designer who innovate and inspire
Big Data Analysis Apps
Transform complexity into opportunity
The Big Data Analysis project spanned 3 months and covered the entire design process from research to final prototype. Our goal is to help marketing analysts to optimize their campaigns by making sense of all the data that's stored in different places and use it to deliver target offers and contents. We successfully helped the user to see which campaign is driving revenue and enabled them to do campaign-optimization by launching this web app.
My Role: UX Designer | UX Researcher | UI Designer
Process: Research | Analysis | Ideation | Prototyping
Tools: Illustrator | Axure | Photoshop
Design Thinking Process
We followed the design thinking process to solicit user's need and perform user-centered research. In order to understand user's real need, we did observation and interviews with users and helped them define their point-of-view for their goal. Then we brainstorm on potential solutions and different ideas. And then we prototype and conducted tests to validate our solutions.
This project is my first time using design thinking approach to solve a specific problem. In the beginning I found myself wondering what does the term "design thinking" means. It seems like a buzz word that get tossed around a lot. Now after countless projects using design thinking, my own explanation to this term is "A method that's structured to make sure that everything you design is one that people actually want." There's a difference between making people want things vs. making things people want. I believe 99.9% of the designers would prefer the latter. So I am very grateful that I got to pick up and practice this methodology during my time working for SAP.
We collected the design of analytical tools that were on the market, printed them out and pinned them on the wall. We noted down every feature and component from each competitor’s product. And then we categorized and consolidated our findings using affinity diagram.
Competitive Analysis
By comparing the features each product vendor provided, we were able to see what kind of features are shared by all the products, and what features are exclusively owned by some certain competitors. By doing so, we quickly identify what functionalities are popular among users and was able to leverage this
information later on.
Observation & Interviews
We observed the end-users using their existing analytical tool and interviewed with them afterwards. We also spoke to people who have similar experiences in their current roles or in the past to see what would make their daily tasks easier.
For each person we interviewed with, we categorize our notes into different categories in oder to see how they felt about the current tools and understand their unsolved needs. For each interview, we started by asking them to tell us who they are and what they do at the company. And then we ask them how they currently use the analytical tools to help them with their jobs, following with questions invited them to talk about the pain points when using the tool. We asked them to demo the tools and walk us through their routine to identify issues that might be missed in our conversations. This gave us a clear idea of what's lacking in the existing tools and helped us to see how can we better the solution by designing something that addresses those needs.
Need Mapping
We mapped users' needs with the competitive analysis we did to see what function we should keep in our new design, and what features we should be adding to it.
For example, the users told us they would love to have the ability to track the traffic trend using the application. Besides that, the ability to mark where they make changes to the campain is also an desired feature to our end users. These gave us a clear picture of the user needs along with which part of the audience will need those features.
Persona
We generated a persona to express the major user needs and help us understand their goals. Doing this was very beneficial to our team because it helped us to step out of ourselves and identify with people that we were designing for.
The persona helped us as a team to share a specific, consistent understanding of the audience group. This also enabled the proposed solutions to be guided by how well they meet the needs of the users.
Persona
We generated a persona to express the major user needs and help us understand their goals. Doing this was very beneficial to our team because it helped us to step out of ourselves and identify with people that we were designing for.
The use case scenario provided a reality check for our designs, allowed us to see how the interaction will play out in the real work environment. Since we work in a cross-functional team, the storyboard was
essential in a sense that it would bring everyone back in a common ground when there's a debate about how the experience should look like.
Theme Options
Besides the defaut theme, we provided users with different theme options for them to choose from at will. The users were pleasantly surprised by this extra feature.
