Many company’s today, are facing the hard truth that their web based applications are out of date and in need of a complete overhaul. In order to correctly proceed, a UX audit and design refresh was in order. MTO was in the process of moving 35 outdated apps to the cloud and really need to make sure the user experience was improved. The app I worked on, called ARIS, was used by internal staff and external users.
By identifying who the internal users were, I was tasked with a series of fact finding interviews to find how it be improved. By interviewing users I was able to discover Pain points they were experiencing, how these pain points could be resolved and what Nice-to-have features might be implemented.
The App was widely used for searching on existing records. Ease of data retrieval was important as well as the presentation. The existing app was using clunky form controls and the user had to rely on clunky tabs to fill out the required fields, in order to make a search. The process was tedious and search results didn’t always return the required data. This needed to be improved upon and was identified as a premier pain point.
To improve on the user experience I had devised a one screen step removing the clunky tabs and allowing the user to perform all search criteria on one page. Within a series of select lists the user would be able to search on multiple criteria drilling-down a broad grouping of key words that would return the most relevant data, with the least amount of user interaction. Using components from Ant Design framework I was able to integrate improved form field elements like lists nested in lists, multi-select lists and radio button selection. Theses changes reduced search time and UI improvements provided an easier search mechanism by reducing the number of clicks a user needed to perform a search.
The mock-up was presented as a potential fix for usability issues with the application. It should be noted that none of the proposed designs were tested with a usability test group. The product did not launch in this iteration.