Case Study
MATTERS APP
How I led ODPP’s User Research as the Sole Designer to improve the performance and user’s day-to-day tasks.
part one
Project overview
The product
MATTERS is an application developed with APPIAN. It is used by different roles inside the organisation, such as solicitors, witness assistant officers, legal support managers, and service desk managers, among others.
The application aims to compile information about the different prosecutions in NSW.
Duration
3 months from August 2024
Role
UX Designer Specialist
Tools
Responsabilities
Discovery Phase and Implementation Plan
Design Studio Workshop Facilitator
User research & interviews
Creating user personas
Defining user flows & information architecture
Conducting usability studies
What did I face?
- A misaligned team
- Overwhelmed dev team
- A strong believe that the UI was the problem
How did I face it?
- I proposed a UX plan
- I aligned devs with a Design System Guide
- I facilitate workshops to rebuild the cross-teams communication
The problem
Every employee using the same application for different purposes. They need to manage and get information from the system smoothly and efficiently because they need to hand over the information to others on time.
Addressing the user needs
1
Streamline the interface to reduce unnecessary steps.
2
Offer users more customisation options to support their diverse workflows and goals.
3
Simplify workflows to improve system performance.
4
Create visual and user experience consistency across the entire application,
The solution
Considering the restrictions of developing with APPIAN (a Low-code platform for process orchestration, automation, and intelligence), redesign the MATTERS’ interface to be intuitive, responsive and streamlined to reduce unnecessary steps, provide better automation, and offer more customisation options to support users’ workflows and goals.
Design + Developers alignment was key!
User sentiment
1
Navigation is complicated
2
Users don’t understand why the system performance is really slow
3
They look for the information at a first glance
4
Up-to-date information is critical for many of them. They want to trust the system fully.
Desgin Process
Empathise
Define
Ideate
Prototype
Test
Desgin Process
Empathise
Define
Ideate
Prototype
Test
part two
Understanding the user
User research
Study Goals:
- Gain a deeper understanding of the current customer experience.
- Understanding the problems users have.
- Identify key opportunity areas for MATTERS application.
- Use opportunities to improve the user experience within MATTERS and other applications.
“If you want to create a great product, you have to start by understanding the people who will use it.” – Don Norman, Co-founder and Principal of Nielsen Norman Group
Addressing the user needs
Just the quicker you can get it done, the better.”
Legal Support Officer user
I just want to click edit and bang! I have my document
Solicitor user
The real pain point is the list generated
Manager Legal Support user
Usability study
Since we have already an application, the first think was to test it. The study tested 8 participants recruited within the organisation. All participants were a variety of MATTERS users.
Continuous conversations and alignment with developers and the product owner were necessary to keep on the right track.
Study type
Remote moderate usability test study
Location
Sydney, Australia. Remote via Microsoft Teams
Sessions
50-60 minutes length
Participants
The study will test 8 participants
part three
Design-Study Workshop
Why I decided to carry out this workshop
The image on the right show some of the user sentiments about their experience with the application.
- I felt that every team across the app were aware about it, but nothing was working.
- The backlog was getting larger.
- Developers, product owner, business analysts, projects managers…everyone seemed to be lost among the infinite Jira tickets…
So I proposed the design-studio workshop!
Facilitating a Design-studio workshop
Upon conducting the research and usability study, it became evident that not only was the user experience compromised, but the collaboration between teams was also suboptimal.
The goal of the design-studio workshop was to rapidly generate and discuss a wide set of ideas. I wanted to empower the teams through this workshop, I wanted to explore possible problems and solutions from different stakeholders’ points of view.
A successful Design-studio workshop!!
The result was a better understanding of how to work across a multidisciplinary team from a user-centric perspective.
The problems were organised in different groups to explore more high-level solutions.
After the two-days workshop we conducted an extra session focusing on an specific issue because it was one of the main problems founded.
Interested in the entire research?
part three
Design System
Problems and challenges
The company must use APPIAN library embebed on the low-code software. The main problem was that it has developing limitations. The challenge was to align a whole team of developers working remotely across Australia under the main design system
1
The company must use APPIAN library
2
Since APPIAN is a low-code system, developers couldn’t change or apply css or html which meant visual limitations
3
There was no consistency across the design system implemented causing severe usability problems
4
That inconsistency was affecting the visual experience, promoting a poor accessibility and making inefficient workflows