Create a project

A new feature to meet user’s needs

Challenge

Aid research team with workshops at 5 Colleges and Northern Essex Community College. Observe students work through design thinking exercises. Use this data to drive new feature initiatives.

Team: UX/UI Designer, Researcher, Business owner
Persona: Elizabeth - Undergraduate student

Mapping user journeys based off user research. Organizing and evaluating materials became very important to users.

Goals

Design a way for students to organize their research materials.
Get buyin from business leadership for future epic and enablement work.
Implement simple/intermin solution for legacy product.

Explore similar behavior on existing products

How are other products handling this behavior? I studied both web pages and apps to see patterns and flows for saving and organizing items. I kept looking back at the research to see when and where students were most likely to save and organize their content. I created user journey maps along the way.

Prototypes

Getting work in front of users early and often is key. We iterated upon the designs after quick rounds of testing on usertesting.com. Periodic checkins of mid to high fidelity designs to key business leaders to push new epics and user stories into our design backlog.

Sketch and Craft to Invision, then off to usertesting.com for quick information.

Explorations into light, dark and customizable views.

Flows and interactions

There are a few ways users create projects and add items to them within Common Researcher. Below are some examples of how user can do this is. An animation style guide was created in junction with this project to streamline motion across EBSCO experiences.

Results

Users love organizing research items in house and see it as a natural behavior, similar to other apps they use daily that organize data. The quick turn around on research and design showed business value in adding this epic to the next product increment. As of today an MVP form of projects exists in beta.

Dashboard

Projects kickstarted a conversation and design work surrounding a “dashboard” for users to save items, see recent activity and keep projects.

Folders in legacy product

Before the 2021 release of Common Researcher work has been done to implement a save/folder system in our classic product. This will help alleviate user’s pain points and set up for the release of a more robust project system in the future.