As the business diversified into new product lines the existing interaction patterns were no longer able to support the increase in complexity resulting in the product becoming increasingly difficult to use. This was evident through the increase in inbound calls to the support centre, customer churn, and the sales team struggling to win new business.
The challenge was to redesign the product so to enable key tasks to be completed by novice users (generally found in SMEs) whilst also providing the necessary functionality for expert users found within larger multinational businesses.
Lead UX
Symantec (MessageLabs) is a cloud based software as a service supplying web and email security services for SMEs through to large corporations.
Understand the needs of novice occasional users (office admin users) through to dedicated expert users (IT administrators).
Identify user pain points and reasons for leaving the service and develop a top-level churn model.
Understand technical constraints from the internal tech team.
Review the existing product lines to identify and group the available functionality in order to design consistent interaction patterns across all product lines.
Design a series of interactive prototypes to be iterated through user testing.
Graphical input to develop the finalised prototypes into set of final designs and style guide.
Given the complexity of the user journeys, low fidelity wireframes were developed to visualise the screen flows for all user journeys. This enabled product and technical validation with product managers, back end developers and technical architects prior to developing the wireframes into interactive prototypes for user testing.
The low fidelity wireframes enabled consistent interaction patterns and universal elements to be developed and iterated rapidly in a more effective manner.
Information architecture drawn up and iterated through online user testing.
User flows & Wireframes
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Interactive prototypes developed in Axure and tested with end users in a series of 1-to1 task based sessions to refine the designs.
Prototype & test
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Liaising with an information designer the refined prototypes were developed into a set of visual designs, which in turn informed the style guide to assist the front end developers in the build process.
Visual design
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DLUX
|+44 (0) 7968 074014 | damien.livingston@gmail.com
The challenge
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Client research was distilled into key themes and user types which was used to create user personas and a high-level churn model. The model itself highlighted barriers to uptake and key pain points.
Technical constraints were explored and identified through a series of meetings with product managers and technical architects.
Research analysis & churn model
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Objectives
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The client had already undertaken a substantial amount of user research. The approach undertaken was to capitalise on the data collected to better understand users to help inform the revised designs.
Approach
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Analysis & Churn model
Review of user research to identify key pain points and events that result in customer churn.
User journeys & Wireframes
Consistent designs and interaction patterns across full product suite developed.
Prototype & Test
Interactive prototypes developed to test key task flows with users and designs iterated.
Visual design
Style guide developed by information designer to be applied to the finalised prototypes.
symantec.com
Usability testing
User journeys
Contextual research
Stakeholder workshops
Requirements capture
Interactive prototyping
Wireframing
Persona development
Project leadership
Stakeholder management
Information architecture
Project planning
User Researcher
UX Designer
Head of UX
Product Manager
As the product had evolved over the years with additional product lines being added the lack of consistency of interaction patterns impacted on the usability of the service. To resolve this, the interactions for the same tasks across the multiple product lines were decomposed and reconstructed to form a single consistent pattern language that was implemented across the new platform.
Creating consistency
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