Maxis Consumers is an enterprise tool at General Motors, used by internal employees to view data reports. They can also create Meetups and download data dictionaries. Due to shifting priorities from the team, Consumers had been left without changes for months, but we now had a chance to make improvements. This was my first project on the team, I designed independently but collaborated with project managers and developers.
Usability Testing
I conducted a heuristic evaluation of the entire site and looked at support messages submitted by users since the last update. Using the issues I found, I wrote a structured script with a task to test every feature.
I then recruited users by asking our developers for a list of power users from our click stream data to see who accessed the site most often. I was able recruit and moderate 12 usability tests.
After all sessions were completed, the notes were summarized in a FigJam board and I made two personas.
Persona 1 - Operations Engineer
- Behaviors
- Searches reports that pertain to her role.
- Creates Meetups
- Finds relevant Meetup trainings through search and filters
- Pain Points
- Number of filters for Meetups is overwhelming
- Unclear directions in the create a Meetup form
- Unclear error messages and cases that shouldn't be errors
Persona 2 - Data Analyst
- Behaviors
- Directly updates data for popular reports
- Knows what he is searching for
- Accesses reports from the favorites on his dashboard
- Pain Points
- No way to organize Favorites
- Needs better speed for reports to update
- Can't quickly search for meetups by Language or using Tags
List of Changes
Based on the feasibility and number of users being impacted, I created a list of prioritized changes. I confirmed the feasibility and importance of each one with the development team and the project managers.
Low Fidelity Designs
Once I gathered inspiration and viewed similar tools,
I created low fidelity wireframes.
Meetup Filters
For the filters on the Meetups page, I hid it within a button along with the tags that used to always be visible, but overwhelming for users.
Create a Meetup
- The stepper was a vertical one on the right side, so I made it horizontal at the top to save space.
- I changed the order of the time and date selectors to prevent certain errors.
- For accessibility, I placed an 'Add' button and instructions when adding tags for a meetup.
High Fidelity Designs
I created the final high-fidelity designs in Adobe XD while following the existing design system for the product.
Reorder Favorites
I added a new feature to the homepage where users can rearrange their favorited reports. They can create groups and drag reports to change their order. This will help users save time when finding their commonly used reports. To view the full flow for this feature, access the prototype at this link.
1. New homepage with Reorder and New Group
2. Creating a new group
3. Drag tiles into new group
4. Changes saved
Create a meetup
These designs stayed very similar to the low-fidelity wireframes. The only difference was that I added recommended tags along with the 'Add' button. To see the full flow, select this link.
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Meetup Filters
Filters are hidden in the frame. The frame can be closed by selecting the 'Filter' button again and selected tags will still be shown outside of the frame.
10% Usage increase
The updated designs were implemented by the end of August 2023.
- We gained an additional 2000 users after this release, going from 20,000 to 22,000 users.
- Changes to Meetups led to a 20% increase in meetup attendance, with the help of the updated search.
- More users accessed their reports from the dashboard compared to before thanks to the addition of reorder for favorites.
- Previously, users would bookmark their most used reports in their browser and so they would only see that specific report page on Consumers.
Conclusion
I designed to the best of my abilities and made sure I accounted for all changes and use cases. I had to make some sacrifices for feasibility but I think those considerations also improved my designs. For saving changes when reordering favorites, I wanted an automatic save feature. After discussing with the developers, this wouldn't be possible, so I created a popup asking the user to save manually.
We weren't able to implement designs for every change on the list due to feasibility and time. I tried to find other ways to alleviate the unaddressed issues, such as updating the help guide on the website since we couldn't have an interactive walkthrough for first time users.
I was very satisfied with the design process, as I felt we were able to fully account for the feedback from our usability tests. This was also my first time on this team leading and working independently on features.