Search Results Redesign

Role

UX Lead, OASIS
2018-19

Tools

Sketch
Invision
Axure
HTML/CSS/Jquery

Skills

UX Design
Interaction Design
User Research
Motion Design

OASIS is a tool used primarily by librarians to purchase and manage academic content. While it fulfilled many basic necessities, customers consistently provided negative feedback about its user experience citing overcomplicated workflows and deprecated UX patterns.

Our competition had largely failed to offer a good quality solution to adequately address these complex challenges. The door had been left open for my team to offer a market-leading title browsing experience where innovative and user-centered design would differentiate and raise OASIS above the others.

Business objectives largely centered around NPS and other user sentiment metrics focused on key features and workflows.

Target Users

This page primarily served Selector Librarians who often conducted more robust and intricate searches. They commonly drew insights from a wide range of title-related details and system statuses in order to finalize thier purchasing decisions.

Secondarily, the new page design targeted Acquisition Librarians. Most often, these librarians searched for known titles that had been requested by students, faculty and other librarians. When evaluating a title, they focused primarily on a subset of fulfillment-related title information.

Design

The core design challenges focused on:

Layering of title information. Titles sometimes carried deep channels of options and information which librarians often needed to explore in a progressive and intuitive fashion.
Flexible and fluid title browsing. Librarians wished to access various pieces of title information in different ways. The new design needed to support a wide range of goals and behaviors which allowed the user to dig as deeply as she desired. Or hardly dig at all.
Clean, scannable visual design. The visual design needed to minimize the cognitive load and communicate a wide range of information at a glance.
Accommodate a wide range of workflows and goals. The product supported numerous types of organizational workflows and user types who sometimes utilized vasty different approaches to achieve their goals. Individuals sometimes considered vastly different sets of information and performed a range of actions on individual titles in accordance with their location and the needs of their institution.
Differentiate the product through innovative and forward-facing interaction, UX and motion design.

Initially, during a site visit at Stanford University, I sat next to librarians in their offices and observed how they evaluated and chose titles. From these sessions, I was able to identify which pieces of information most often mattered most to librarians and better understand how librarians wished to evaluate titles before purchasing.

Testing and Developing a Strategy

To ensure the team progressed strategically towards a better and more cohesive user experience, I focused my studies on finding our users’ most pressing pain points and on finding which improvements would offer the most fruitful impact. To better understand those strengths and weaknesses I

interviewed customers extensively to understand and rank their levels pain with each feature
tested and iterated on prototypes to better understand which type of design solutions best resolved their pain points and increased their happiness with the product

I explored these vectors in tandem. Usually, I would spend the first half of a user testing session exploring the user’s background, goals and pain points. The second-half of the user testing session usually focused on a prototype to better understand which solutions had the strongest resonance.

When talking about their pain points, users consistently mentioned the title browsing experience as a top area of contention.

Most notably:

Title information appeared cluttered and disorganized
The Search Page display was confined to a horizontal split screen layout which poorly utilized the screen real estate. Additionally, this layout exhibited buggy behavior when resized by the user
The existing interaction model required what users felt were extraneous clicks to complete common tasks

The design improvements and overall strategy aimed to address the top pain points by identifying and sequencing a series of milestones which laddered up to a more cohesive and positive user experience.

Solution

After considerable user testing and iteration, the design settled on a drawer interaction model along with a clean, attractive visual interface. I chose this model because it could display considerable title information while keeping the browse experience fluid and flexible. Librarians could seamlessly jump in and out of title details and not get locked into separate screens or rigid workflow requirements. Importantly, the interface offered lots of flexibility. Librarians could take an action on a title at any point in their process no matter how deeply they wished to dig into a title.

I contributed significantly to a vision and rollout strategy which included:

introduced a completely new visual language and interaction model to help users scan and quickly ascertain all her format buying options
developed an innovative algorithm which hid or de-emphasized less desireable purchasing options
replace a cumbersome UX pattern with traditional checkboxes and bulk actions
re-architected the product’s navigation the de-clutter the experience across all page
consolidated ordering-related activities into consistent checkout screens

Measuring and Quantifying Success

The product team continuously gathered customer feedback during this process through several feedback channels:

Regularly met with a User Group composed of librarians from 13+ Academic Institutions from across the world
Monitored and acted on an Idea Exchange where any customer could submit and vote on product improvement ideas
Regularly contacted sales and customer service representatives
Periodically sent out a surveys to all customers

As for the survey, we set baseline metrics a few weeks before releasing our first round of changes. Six months later, we followed up with a nearly identical survey. The surveys provided some useful and encouraging insights:

Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) score jumped by an impressive 12 points. We observed a considerable shift from detraction to neutrality
Users reported improved sentiments about nearly all the major features in the product
We observed a slight drop in satisfaction with search functionality
Some overall gains in business metrics were attributed to the team’s UX improvements

What I Learned

Details matter. During some early user tests, librarians sometimes got tripped up with conflicting dummy data or had trouble evaluating titles outside of their area of expertise. I quickly learned to center the prototype around the user at hand. In some cases, I modified my prototype to address a single user’s unique scenario to ensure she didn’t get derailed by dissonant information in the prototype.
Keep pushing ahead. When a designing for a complex interdependent ecosystem of features, it’s often time-consuming to prototype and test dramatically different UX approaches. Don’t settle for “nice.” Keep pushing towards a better solution even if it means retooling a complex prototype!
Read between the lines. When prompted to provide feedback on the UI, users regularly requested additional features, complex data visualizations and other customizations which often didn’t add considerable value or solve pressing pain-points. It took exceptional focus and self-restraint to not accept those types of requests at face value. Instead, I explored what problem they wished to solve with their request and explored the level of value these types of feature requests might add.