Digital made in DE

Leading the conceptual development of the product I needed to identify and include all relevant stakeholder needs and find a modus operandi that carefully considered and balanced user, technological and political/strategic requirements.

In order to build an information platform with a great search experience that could best serve the various kinds of information and formats available, it was crucial to develop a comprehensive taxonomy and an appropriate information architecture.
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Another big challenge was the fairly short time frame we were facing, with only 10 months from the initiation until Go-Live.

Initialize‍

In order to develop meaningful solutions it is crucial to understand the problem and know where your client is coming from. Having only a very short amount of time until product launch makes it even more important to have everyone on the same page as soon as possible.
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That is why I started with some basic questions before I was even thinking about any answers:

Which problem do we want to solve?
Why do we want to solve it?
Who will benefit from the solution?
Who are our users?
How would we recognize that we were successful?
What has been tried in the past to solve this problem?
What resources and tool are available for this project?
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The goal here was to align the project team and get a good overview of the project scope in order to coordinate relevant resources and plan out necessary activities in a timely fashion.

Empathize

From there on we could have a closer look at what we know or assume we know about our potential users and the challenges they face whilst completing their tasks. The main goal here was to collect all the existing knowledge and assumptions and present it in a visual, lightweight form that could then be used as a reference point for discussions and decisions later on in the project.

Analyze

With that fundamental understanding of project goals and stakeholder needs, it was time to further examine all the available data and information in order to develop an efficient, effective and satisfying user experience.

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Here are some examples of the activities that were involved:

• Analyzing the current content and information structure in order to develop an accessible, scalable and resilient information architecture, including an efficient and effective taxonomy concept

•  Identifying and prioritizing relevant search, filter and sorting criteria

• Benchmarking of existing products and platforms that face similar challenges in terms of structure and information complexity

• Collecting visual design inspiration in order to define the look and feel of the future system

• Identifying any potential constraints to consider when creating the future user interface elements (existing style guides etc.)

• Analyzing and specifying any additional requirements (integration of data visualization tools etc.)

Ideate

After organizing and analyzing all the available data and information, we had a solid starting point and could begin designing and iterating solutions.

Here are some core activities that were involved:

• Developing a resilient information architecture including a scalable navigation concept with an efficient and effective search/filter experience

• Creating and iterating user flows and wireframes for all the main pages and components like landing page, search result page, detail page etc.

• Defining the visual look and feel of the website (UI-Kit, button states, transitions, animations etc.)

• Creating responsive (mobile) versions of all main pages and components

• Integration and visual customization of the charts, bars and maps of the visualization library (visual/information design)

• Building an example prototype that shows the happy path (ideal user flow) of the future user and demonstrates the main elements of the solutions

Evaluate

As we didn’t have the opportunity or resources to execute qualitative usability test, our evaluation process consisted of several iterations within our interdisciplinary team of UX designers, UI designers, front/backend developers and client decision-makers.

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Here are some core activities that helped us improve our product:

• Constant heuristic evaluation

• Consideration of established dialogue principles (e.g. ISO 9241-110)

• Regular collection of feedback from experienced colleagues

• Regular consultation and evaluation with the development team

• Small internal hallway usability tests

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Implement

After several iterations involving continuous evaluation of the design against user and stakeholder requirements we could finally start implementing.

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The following activities and assets helped us to move from Ideation to Implementation:

• Providing meaningful documentation with detailed specifications for all relevant components and elements

• Agreeing on a unified language for all relevant components and elements

• Providing useful deliverables in order to ensure the previous process and resulting decisions are transparent and comprehensible

• Ensuring availability for questions and discussions

• Continuous review and (re)prioritization of requirements and tickets

• Providing all the necessary assets for front and backend development

Every project is unique and there is always something to learn or take away that will help you to improve and grow not only as a professional, but as a person. So never stop learning, because life never stops teaching.

Here are some things I could take away from this project:

• When the time is short, start and fail as early as possible

• Work and communicate with lightweight work items and deliverables

• Go with what works rather than what is popular

• Interdisciplinary communication is key, especially when you think you don’t have time for it

• Work items that visualize the teams decisions and progress help a lot to keep everyone aligned

• Be brave enough to ask your stupid and naive questions

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