At a Glance
Project: Making Incremental Usability Improvements on a Legacy System
Main Deliverables: Heuristic Evaluation, User Interviews, Stakeholder Interviews, User Personas, Affinity Map
Tools: Adobe XD, Miro, Microsoft Teams
Goals: Understand the user experience overall by finding common functionalities across users, come up with recommendations to incrementally improve within the system, and present the findings to the team
Background
At Riva Solutions Inc., we practice Human-Centered Design while utilizing Agile Scrum Kanban methodology, where we focus on the users to get down to the root of the problems that we need to solve, to work on projects by progressing incrementally.
The purpose of this user research was to evaluate an outdated legacy payment system that has had very little updates since the 1990's when the system was first created. As the UX Researcher/UX Designer on this project, I was tasked with identifying the major pain points and frustrations from the main users across various agencies.
We focused on the main problem that seemed to be occurring from our perspective of the user, which was that they seem to have a lot of issues with the system and being unaware of features other than the ones they were currently utilizing, since there is no user manual or formal training for the system.
The UX research plan was to understand, research, analyze, and then to present our findings and recommendations on how to improve the system to the team.
Goals
I spoke with stakeholders and project managers to understand the problem, requirements, and establish goals. It was already known that many users were complaining to support that they find the system confusing, especially when learning how to perform new tasks, or for users being introduced to the system for the first time.
Discovery
We then used discovery methods for our user research by conducting user interviews to identify pain points and gather insights and commonalities across users from various agencies to better understand the system and the users' overall journey.
User Interviews
24 users were asked to participate in remote semi-structural interviews that included a set of pre-determined open-ended questions to explore particular themes and certain responses further. I found it more helpful to do these semi-structural interviews over structured ones, so that I can dig deeper into the reason why users feel the way that they do about their specific experiences.
Contextual Inquiry
Contextual inquiries were also included in each interview, as we asked the users to share their screens as they walk us through tasks they use everyday in the system. Users were asked questions about what their most frustrating part about completing their daily tasks in the system are, if there’s any way that the system isn’t supporting their needs, and if there is anything that the users look for in the system that may be missing or hard to find.
Usability Testing
During interviews, participants were asked to walk us through any daily tasks used within their typical workday while in the system, to help us gain a better understanding of the user experience along with which menu options are being utilized, as there seemed to be many menu options with the users unsure of their specific purposes.
Heuristic Evaluation
In order to quickly identify common usability issues, I conducted a heuristic evaluation of the legacy system using Jakob Nielsens’ 10 usability heuristics. Coupled with the UX research, I was able to provide a set of concrete recommendations on how to improve overall system usability over time.
Conclusion
As the research phase has been completed for this project and design changes have been implemented, we have implemented several design changes based on the recommendations of the are now waiting on approval to revamp the entire system to create a more user-friendly and appealing software.
* Please note that I have an NDA with the company as I unfortunately will be unable to show any of the design.