How does the home dashboard fit into End users’ overall work process?
Survey Contextual Inquiry Card Sorting Heuristic Evaluation Usability Testing
Improved the SUS score by 73%
Simpplr is a company founded in 2014 whose primary product is their eponymous employee experience platform.
An employee experience platform is an intranet with social capabilities, i.e., it acts as a local computer network where employees can share files and host internal communications.
Simpplr has 1000+ clients across multiple industries, e.g., DocuSign, Nutanix, the World Economic Forum, etc.
Our team was paired with Simpplr through the course PSYC 6023: Psychological Research Methods for HCI at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
View the Product (Simpplr Prototype)
UX Researchers (2), UX Designers (2)
Aug 2024 - Dec 2024 (5 Months)
We chose to disseminate a survey so we could gain insight into current usage and preferences on the home dashboard. Moreover, we wanted this understanding to hold high validity while minimizing the level of participant effort and potential for bias.
I led contextual inquiries so we could (1) develop an understanding of End users’ overall work process and (2) identify the role the home dashboard plays within this process. Additionally, this method allowed us to directly observe participants in action and produce a rich level of qualitative data.
Our participants were a range of Simpplr employees who utilize Simpplr for work tasks.
We reached out to 40+ prospective participants but unfortunately only received 3 responses, i.e., we found our target users weren't as willing to provide the extended amount of time necessary for this method.
Our contextual inquiries often devolved into more traditional interviews. Therefore, we should have communicated the nature of this method more effectively in order to ensure these sessions focused more on participants presenting their work process.
I supported creating a user persona because I wanted to give our team and internal stakeholders an approachable way to digest our research data and therefore empathize with target users.
Our user persona was directly based on the findings from our survey and contextual inquiries.
Inspired by our findings, I realized our product isn't truly a dashboard if it's showing the user everything—that’s just a webpage. On the other hand, a dashboard surfaces content that’s most relevant to the user. Therefore, we utilized our research to determine what was most relevant to the End user and placed this content prominently within our design.
I chose card sorting because our turning point necessitated a reimagination of Simpplr’s information architecture and we wanted to ensure our new design corresponded with End users’ mental models. Furthermore, we carried out this method in a remote, unmoderated environment so we could gather data as quickly as possible while minimizing the possibility of influencing participants.
Our participants were End users who were employed by either Simpplr or Simpplr’s clients.
I included a disproportionate number of Simpplr employees because they also use their employee experience platform and I found they were more receptive to participate in research (I sent 200+ outreach messages to employees of Simpplr’s clients).
We chose heuristic evaluations because we wanted to quickly determine larger usability issues and integrate common heuristics into addressing them.
I advocated for usability testing because I wanted to (1) validate previous design decisions (2) uncover pain points, and (3) gain a holistic understanding of the system’s usability. Moreover, this method allowed us to perform research in an environment where we could directly observe as well as make participants feel more comfortable to share due to the more personal nature of moderated sessions.
Our participants were experts and End users who fulfilled our recruitment criteria.
K-Block