Brittany Nowicki
THE CHALLENGE
Background
It’s my first week as an intern and when the team comes out of an all hands meeting on day 2, I had an assignment that needed to be started…now and finished, well, now.
The fin-tech start-up I work for, Aptiviti, is comprised of 3 main products that all assist players in the Financial industry evaluate technology spending across industries on a global scale. Backed by data, both quantitative and qualitative, the company does a pretty good job at making their content accessible and available for all of their clients. Over the past few months, prior to my start, they received a lot of feedback from their clients that they wanted to be able to quickly scan through the reports and VENN Event Transcriptions for the particular thing they were looking for - right on the platform, instead of having to access the platform, download the content, and CTL+F for their topic.
Our challenge was to redesign our current customer facing platform so that our clients could search more directly in our Event Transcripts for their desired insight.
The Duration
This project was completed, from start to finish, in about 2 weeks. Research, designs, and iterations taking place in week 1 and development taking place in week 2.
THE OVERVIEW
MY ROLE
My internship allowed me to work on the Dev Team comprised of 1 UX Designer, 1 Front End Developer/Designer, 3 Full Stack Developers and the VP of Engineering. Because the company and team is so small, I worked very closely with every member of the team to ensure the designs were cohesive and translated into the final product.
I was the Principle UI/UX Designer for this feature; tasked with abiding by the original brand guide and utilizing current functionality to integrate the Transcription Search feature into the client interface.
THE PROCESS
Brainstorming & Ideation
An easy option would have been to mimic the layout/structure of the alternative; it would have been familiar to our clients while still incorporating their desires and making their feedback feel heard, but we wanted to be different. We wanted to set ourselves apart in a way that made them feel comfortable with something new yet still familiar.
Below is the three-column search layout our clients were use to utilizing. The general idea of our task was to create a solution that met the users need for this functionality within our application.
After the all-hands meeting, I sat with the VP, UX Lead, and Front-End Developer to strategize and work through our options. Below is the initial conceptualization/sketches of the idea and necessary inputs/items to incorporate.
Work flow
FIRST
First I started with a low(er) fidelity version to get a feel for the layout I was going for and taking stock of all the content we needed to fit within that layout, while still keeping in line with the current site cohesion.
The main idea was: the user would enter the transcription search and search for the keyword or phrase they were interested in learning about. This would query the system to return results of all the VENN Event transcriptions with that string of words and each event would tell you how many times that result was found in that particular transcript, or 'snippets'. The specefic event could then be expanded to view the transcript and the highlight snippets. You would then be able to jump to specific snippets or perform a secondary search within the transcript, in order to dive deeper into the topic you originally queried.
We decided together on a collapsable/expandable design - within each search result and below is the general idea of how we intened the process to look.
Here is the actual first draft of the feature - displaying entire list of VENN Event results, then drilled down into the number of snippet results, expandable chevron, download button, highlighted snipped results in the left panel, and the full transcript with highlighted keywords throughout.
SECOND
In the second go, I did some rearranging and with the additional inclusion of some elements from our search results rendered in our marketplace. Very visible components are the 'view' options the clients have and I thought it important to still keep those options available.
THIRD
In the third iteration we tried utilizing more design features from that current Report pages clients were already familiar with. We added in the icons we currently use for 'view' and the date and location design - extending the overall height of each Event component. I tried 2 different way of displaying the icons below.
FOURTH
After testing in the office with other teams, I went back to the second iteration display of the Event information and updated the icon display with the collapsable/snippet view added back into the design.
FINAL
Below is the final product feature with the addition of the VENN Transcription Search added to the VENN Product Page. The overall process was quick, but each iteration led to significant improvements of the overall design and user experience of the feature. Throughout the two weeks, my sights were always set on building function and ease for our clients. Being brand new to the product myself, it was almost instinctual to empathize with the people who would use this for the first time and over my time designing this from start to finish I could now empathize with the consistent user we intended to keep comfortable and appeased.
Though the feature is only accessible with a subscription to the platform, below is a video recording of the developed feature in real-time.
Wireframes
ITERATIONS
Summary
Prior to the release, we tested our prototypes with the VENN and Sales team and received a lot of positive feedback. They provided updated copy and suggested that the addition of the new functionality, required us to make updates on our supplemental pages and asked for the creation of a marketing page to help convert potential clients that were on the fence/promote all of our benefits. Before sending a blast about the update to our existing members, we made an effort to thank our supporting clients who helped us recognize this need and allowed them first access to the feature for their feedback. Some small copy edits were made based on their understanding and when the feature went live we got the two thumbs-ups from the CEO.
Next steps include the design of the Marketing page and gather data for future improvements from user interviews.