Global thought leadership app
This app is a curated selection of thought leadership pieces written by experts from different territories and service/industry leaders within an international professional services firm. It had not been updated in many years so there was appetite within the firm to make improvements and bring it more inline with the newly simplified brand system.
As our client was not one of the main stakeholders our team’s challenge was to make recommendations that he could easily present to them in order to secure the full project.
Client: Top 4 professional services firm
Agency: TheTin
Date: 2018
Role: Lead UX designer
Team: Head of Design, 2 Designers, Strategist, Front End Developer and Project Manager
Tools: Existing app, Google Sheets, Powerpoint, Photoshop and Sketch
Please note that all designs relating to this client have been modified for portfolio usage.
The approach
To make sure our recommendations would target core issues and would be easily presented to the stakeholders we decided that our approach should be based on a heuristic review of the existing app. As part of a core team of UX experts from TheTin and from the client’s firm we each completed a list of user tasks, such as creating an account, and scored them against the heuristics defined by NNG.
After our individual heuristic reviews we came together and pooled our findings. There were a lot of overlaps in our scores so we were able to see key areas that should be prioritised. These included:
Improving the onboarding experience.
Making sure the header area was consistent throughout the app.
Simplifying the navigation.
Focusing on the consistency and standards heuristic.
These findings became a top level report that was presented to the client. A more visual deliverable was needed for the client to present to the stakeholders so I produced a presentation that tracked all the issues that we had found laid out in ‘as they are now’ user journeys. This highlighted all of the issues that users completing a single task would face. I then mocked up replacement screens that showed quick fixes for each issue. These were laid out in ‘as they could be’ user journeys.
The goal with this process was to show the big picture improvement to the user experience rather than focusing on granular fixes.
Example of ‘as it is’ and ‘as it could be’ functionality
The solution
This heuristic review helped to win the job of redesigning the app inline with the newly simplified visual identity as well as implementing all of our recommendations. Another designer completed this phase of the project while I provided creative oversight on the application of the digital brand and made sure all of our recommendations were addressed.
The client’s internal IT department were to implement our UI updates and UX recommendations so I provided additional guidance to their developers to get the build phase underway.
Reflections
The heuristic UX process was very successful in this project because it allowed the experts to zoom in to find granular issues and bugs as well as zooming out to look at how that affects the user in completing the task. As a result the findings and presentation became much more compelling to the stakeholders and generated further work.