by Product Background
While working at Cambridge Semantics, I was the Lead UX/UI Designer for their new product, Anzo Smart Data Lake (Anzo). Anzo is an enterprise data management platform that allows users to ingest, organize, discover, and analyze disparate datasets in order to form meaningful insights. Previously, Cambridge Semantics had multiple software applications primarily developed for administrative IT staff. Anzo Smart Data Lake was intended as a single unifying product with a focus on business users.
Problem Statement
As mentioned above, Anzo was the compilation of multiple products that needed to be unified because (1) users were wasting time moving between applications and relearning different design patterns and (2) there was no brand recognition because each application had a different look and feel. My first project was to bring all products into one application. However, this did not solve all the challenges of inefficiency and inconsistency. Besides using Material Design as our framework, there were no standards on which widgets, colors, or icons to use or how those UI components functioned. This meant that while code was being transferred over from previous products, the usability and style was disjointed. While internal users were beta testing the application, I received feedback on how they did not know how to complete tasks as well as overall general frustration with Anzo.
User Research
In order to understand how to both improve the workflow of the product and create more consistency in the UI, I evaluated the UI against a list of usability heuristics, conducted a usability test on myself, and solicited feedback from our internal users. My goals for conducting this research was to:
- Understand the user’s decision making process and their mental models of how the UI should work in order to reduce unnecessary complexity.
- Increase consistency in widgets/colors/interactions to increase efficiency.
Takeaways
My main takeaway after conducting my user research was that Anzo’s workflow was disjointed for users and it was not clear how to complete the tasks that they needed to. For example, after selecting a file that a user wanted to bring into Anzo, it was not clear what needed to happen after the initial selection. These challenges in the workflow could be due to lack of guidance in the UI for what the user should do next or “unsuccessful guidance.” An example of “unsuccessful guidance” was a button next to a project that would publish the project. However, the user did not recognize the icon on the button and there was no text accompanying the button, so the user did not know how to publish the project.
While I mainly focused on how to better guide the user throughout the UI, I also focused on:
- Only using colors defined in a limited color palette.
- Making sure each icon was associated with only one concept.
- Simplifying the language used.
- Decreasing unnecessary white space and generally better utilizing UI space.
- Increasing readability by improving the information architecture of the UI.
- Making sure that interactions were consistent (i.e. clicking the edit button opens a dialog, clicking the save button closes the dialog).
- Giving the user feedback whenever an action is completed or hits an error.
Design Improvements
By conducting this user research I was able to identify both major and minor updates to the user interface that had substantial impacts on overall usability. I coordinated closely with the development team during the implementation process, managed and prioritized hundreds of JIRA tickets, and led an effort to create design standards and a formal design library. Below are images comparing the old UI before I started working on it and the updated UI. Updating the UI was a process that I underwent during the majority of my time at Cambridge Semantics.
Design Standards
In order to efficiently design and update code moving forward, it was important me to create design standards based on the redesign efforts. I wanted to have a Sketch library of all design components in order to improve consistency, communication, and efficiency among the design team, but also have an output for non-designers to benefit from. I wanted to have a PDF document that visually showed all our standards with descriptions of how they function in order to improve communication among the development team and the communication between development and design. In my dream world, this PDF document would be its own website to house images of the widgets, guidelines on how to use the widgets, and links to the code for the widgets. However, the PDF was a sufficient MVP.
I pitched to the VP of Engineering and the CTO the importance of hiring a UX intern for creating a design library and I was thrilled when I got the sign off to start this project. I managed a UX intern and a contract UX Designer in order to bring the design library to reality.
Icon Library
As part of the redesign effort, I determined that creating a formal icon library was necessary to establish visual consistency throughout the application.I wanted the icons to both live in the Sketch design library as well as a Google Drive folder shared with the whole company, so that if anybody was creating a slide deck, demo, etc, they could access both SVGs or PNGs of any image. I worked closely with the Pre-Sales and Marketing teams to make sure that the Google Drive was easy to use and access. It was important to me for the whole organization to have access to our imagery in order to spread a design language spoken throughout the organization.
I hired, collaborated with, and managed a graphic designer to create both glyph icons and bigger images to be used throughout the product. I was the bridge between our designer and our developers — working with both parts of the organization to make sure that everyone had the proper file formats and that icons rendered as they should. In the end, our graphic designer and I collaborated on over 200+ icons.
Zoe Monosson 