Reinvigorating a Market Leader in Market Research.

Decipher, an extensive but aging survey building tool, had fallen behind competitors with less features but better ux.  As the lead designer for the project, I had a high level of autonomy and was largely responsible with setting direction and producing deliverables. I worked with a junior designer in the beginning of the project and a visual designer towards the end. 

The results : 

Brand new personas based on real world research
A sophisticated prototype and future concepts 
Short term improvements to drastically improve the quality of the current system

The team

• Lead designer (me)
• Junior designer / researcher
• Client developer lead
• Client Product manager
• Client designer (consultant)

We found a robust but overly technical legacy tool that didn't match newer offerings 

We were tasked with updating Decipher, a robust tool for deploying complex surveys and analyzing results. The interface was brittle and crafting a survey or analyzing results often required the use of xml coding. FocusVision wanted to bring Decipher in line with newer competitors like Qualtrics. 

I pushed the client to hone in on exactly who and what qualities they wanted to emulate in their future designs

I began with an audit of the current experience and a round of competitive analysis. Besides competitors, FocusVision had a set of contemporary applications they wanted the experience to be on par with. I made sure to include those applications and describe some key points we could absorb as the project progressed.

I led the process to interview market research professionals and create personas

With the help of our junior designer, who had a research background, we interviewed 26 market research professionals across experience and roles. We split the task of listening to and deriving insights from the interviews, convening for "book reports" and sharing notes. We derived core qualities and spectrums of experience and ranked them in workshops with clients. 

We hosted a two-day workshop with our client to create our core personas. We ended up with a total of five, including a new primary persona who represented the younger, scrappier market researcher the company needed to target. 

We created rough concepts and used them to solicit feedback from market researchers

We created rough concepts on functionality, pasted them to boards, and did guerilla market research on the floor of a conference and at FocusVision's booth. 

Keeping our concepts broad let participants give us key insights into what details they'd want our ideas to include. And participants were all too happy to share their experience with Decipher, validating audit findings.

Feedback in hand, we redesigned the core survey creation flow

We then moved on to redesigning the core product flow. Through a series of sketches and concepts we honed in on a design that focused the user’s attention on the primary task of building and configuring questions. Testing, styling, and configuring logic, were far less common tasks for our users but needed to be quickly accessible.

We ultimately worked through several iterations of each, page, honing in on a core flow which we turned into a lightweight prototype.

For advanced logic and path configuration, we began to design an extended “map” view that would visualize a survey taker’s path through the survey.

At this stage in the process we were ready to translate our screens into visual design and hand them over to developers

After a CEO demands updates to the legacy product, I lead the team to refocus UX efforts. 

The new CEO was concerned that the current design work was taking precedence over fixing glaring holes in the current interface. He wanted to see the current experience improved in time for the next release, giving us 6 weeks to push updates to development.  I had 4 weeks left on the project and was the only remaining ux resource when this news hit.

Stepping outside my comfort zone to build a comprehensive improvement backlog

I helped the client quickly spin up a backlog of improvements that prioritized the sweet spot of ease of development and impact to the experience. The team rallied and we collaboratively evaluated and prioritized possible updates.  In a very short period of time I had designed several low-development feature updates that drastically improved the current interface.

I provided long tersm strategic guidance and drove several hours to present it in person

I compiled a deck to wrap up lessons learned from the project and present suggestions based on my experience as a design consultant. This deck reflected the current design work but also envisioned a future of renewed innovation. I drove several hours to their offices and presented our deck alone to a large group including our client team, developers and one of the company co-founders.

Surprisingly, this presentation netted me some of the most positive feedback I had received while on the project (and probably ever in my career). And that's considering I had helped them completely reimagine a large chunk of their application.

Results

• New personas built on a comprehensive body of qualitative research
• A reimagined survey creation flow with a contemporary updated interface
• Near term improvements built on top of a brand new backlog I built from scratch