UX Research and Design for -“Notify ” at Amazon
Notify is a browser plugin that works with salesforce to offer better UI and UX to users.
☞ Summary: “Notify” saved 12,000 minutes a day in our design team, helping to improve productivity by 5%.
Miss Jane Doe, 29 years old, works as a visual designer, in Seattle with the Amazon DSP (Amazon Demand-side Platform) team. Her day-to-day responsibilities like creating an Amazon product page, Banner design, Product video editing, etc. She generally follows the internal tool to communicate with other Amazonians like CPM (Campaigning manager), UX designer or Researcher, developer, and another peer designer, and below you can see she follows this process in her daily routine to provide her best design work.
She came to her office on Friday morning at 09:00 AM and then began to check her new mail or job status on her laptop that she is currently working on. She is actually busy with her lot of work to be submitted by today, but she seems to have a lot on her plate, in a while, assigned another job (ticket/assignment) that she has to review the assignment and approve by today. She is now very anxious and concerned about how, in a short period of time, she will finish her job.
So one day I noticed this issue that designers face on a daily basis, and as a UX design researcher through digital media, I really love solving problems. Next, I talked to my manager and explained the issue to him, and luckily I got permission to count as an of the Initiative project.
My Role and Responsibilities: UX designer and researcher under the supervision of the Manager. My responsibilities included Identifying the exact problem, selecting a proper research method, creating a research plan, conducting research and collecting data and converting it into insight, creating a wireframe and design, explaining our idea to the developer, and keeping track of how the development process is going on and finally Usability testing.
Is this a real problem that is worth solving?
Scope of research
Objective 1: Is this a real problem?
Objective 2: If yes, then what is the solution?
☞ Now my job is to Identify the Exact Problem (User Research)
A. Conducting Survey:
[How many users are saying? or subjective opinion?]
In the design team, we have a total of approx 200 visual designers and first I wanted to understand how many designers are facing the same problem as Miss Jane Doe. So for that, I ran a survey with the help of our internal tool to Quantify the problem and we asked a question like:
☞ Survey Goal: How many people are facing issues like Miss Jane Doe?
☞ Survey Questions Type: Mix with open-ended and close-ended.
A. How many hours do you work per day?
(Result: As per survey data 85% of designer says it’s more than 10 hours)
B. Do you feel the time is enough for you to complete a Ticket/Assignment?
(Result: As per survey data 94% of designer says No)
C. How many maximum tickets you are working on in parallel?
(Result: As per survey data 78% of designer says they worked on average 5–7 tickets parallel)
D. What is the most time-consuming step or stage in the Ticket/Assignment?
(Result: As per survey data 88% of user says it’s in the Needs to Approve
Assignment stage)
E. Any other problem you are facing while you are working on a Ticket/Assignment?
(Result: Difficult to understand all the information, sometimes we don’t get a notification (mail) if any assignment has any status changes.
B. Conducting Diary Study:
[What is the problem?]
☞ Research Goal: Next I wanted to understand their day-to-day life activity in the office for a longer period of time, for that reason I chose diary study research which is used to collect qualitative data about user behaviors, activities, and experiences over time.
[Why Diary studies?]
Since we wanted to have a better understanding of the user over a longer period of time, how are they interacting with the project and what challenges are they facing?
As a reason, the dairy study would be perfect in Understanding Long-Term User Behavior and Experiences.
☞ Create a Research Plan:
We conducted our diary study digitally because we have designers from the US, UK, DE, and FR and it’s easy to share and keep track, so we shared the Google doc with multiple questions like:
- From what time did you start working on your project today?
- How many assignments you are working on?
- Do you face any roadblockers today and why?
- Is there any new assignment that you have got today?
- At what time do you finish today’s work?
etc…
☞ Who we tested: Our main target audience like Miss Jane Doe, so I have a total of 200 visual designers who is our target audience it’s not possible to conduct user research with all of them so based on the survey result I identified some of the designers who actually represent the target persona.
☞ Participant Recruitment: Since I mentioned our target audience is a visual designer in my organization it is not necessary to recruit participants from outside. I sent an invitation to 12 to participate in the diary study.
☞ Equipment Needed: A computer with internet access, paper, and pen, lots of Post-it notes, etc.
☞ Conducting Research: First I explained to them individually the purpose of the research, then shared the Google doc file and asked them to fill in the information (questions we asked) by the end of the day, and I continued this research for 10 business days with our participant.
☞ Data Collection & Analysis: After 10 days of long research, I collected a bunch of data and information, now it’s time to convert the data into meaningful insight for analysis I have used Thematic Analysis which basically helps us by identifying themes and reasons.
☞ Research Findings:
[What is the problem?]
After the Thematic Analysis with my other UX practitioner, I have some insight that is represented in an Affinity diagram.
Creating personas helps us to recognize that different people have different needs and expectations, so it can also help us to identify with the user we are designing for.
☞ Now my Job is to Convert insights into Design/Solutions (UX Design)
[What is the solution ?]
User flow diagram is hierarchical and shows relationships among pieces of the whole. It’s an important part of UX design steps that helps me to think like a user.
After a lot of design discussions with my manager and other UX practitioners, I came up with a basic Low-Fi wireframe version before starting the experience design.
☞ Why “Notify plugin” provide better UX?
1. We have removed all the redundant field (more than 100) if you compare with the old design and now we only show our customer the relevant fields or details that helps to minimize cognitive loads.
2. Previously, users had to go to a separate section to chat with others, but now users can chat with anyone in the same window.
3. We have added a notification feature so this user can get any notifications on his / her task.
4. We have included extra voice search (optional) because I have observed that some of my target users (38%) don’t like to type a big search query.
5. Aesthetic-Usability Effect: People love to use good UI, interface, the color design instead of a boring colorless app because the color creates emotions, so I have tried to make a good design that makes it more enjoyable for users.
6. Last but not least, we’ve created a mobile app (Android / IOS) that helps them monitor their assignment without carrying laptops all the time.
☞ Conclusion & Closing Thoughts:
For this initiative project, I was fully under my manager and I am quite grateful for my manager because of his continuous support and motivation, I was quite anxious and excited before beginning the user research I faced some challenges like the development issue and some privacy concerns regarding data from IT team but my experience and leadership skills help me run this smoothly. At the time of user research, I interacted with real users to understand their pain points which helped me to create better a customer-centric design. Lastly, I am delighted that this project has had a positive effect on the company by saving 12,000 minutes a day in our design team, helping to improve productivity by 5%.
If you are interested in knowing about how we proved through statistics that it has a really statistical significance difference because of using the new tool then please click here
Thank you for your time :)
