SkillSuite Groups Feature
USER EXPERIENCE AND VISUAL INTERFACE DESIGN
Experience and interface design for Groups feature in SkillSuite software.
We designed a new groups feature to improve how to set up users in the organization.
COMPANY OVERVIEW
SkillSuite is a training tool for business employees. SkillSuite helps businesses minimize the headache for training and employees and makes it easy for business leaders to share training materials and track employee progress.
THE TEAM
1 UX Designer, 6 Developers, 1 Product Owner
How did we have impact?
Developing product strategy and simple user research with stakeholders
Creating, developing, and presenting new user experience ideas
Designing interface, creating prototype, and doing usability testing
Worked closely with developers to ensure high quality work
What was the problem?
Stakeholders noticed confusion on how to correctly set up your organization in the software.
Proposed solutions to the problem
After having previously tried two other ideas, I concluded a converting organization to a groups feature would help eliminate existing confusion for how to group together users within the organization and setting up permissions.
Flow Chart Hierarchy
Our first rendition, but it wasn’t clear to users how to set permissions or do levels.
User Groups
The concept was simpler and more intuitive for how to group users and set permissions.
List View with Tiers and Entities
Terminology and levels were hard for users to understand and to visualize permissions.
Not every situation allows for the ideal experience design process for a development team. I experienced the following challenges while working on this project:
Lack of User Research
A lack of user research before beginning to design the user experience can lead to some poor choices being made based on thoughts or opinions with proof of what a user actually needs.
Stakeholder Pushback
Oftentimes those who are emotionally invested in the project are so focused on what they think is important that they automatically assume they know what the user wants. When those wants don’t match up, it can result in wasted time and money.
Rushed Timelines
Rushing the design process can result in lower quality design and development because of not allowing the necessary time to think through any potential problems or properly test ideas.
Lack of Roadmapping
Skipping the original standard process of long-term roadmapping for a product can often result in wasted time and money because of lack of planning for the long term goals of a product.
Experience Design
Proposed solutions to the problem
Zach, The CEO, creates groups within the new SkillSuite groups feature and is delighted at how simple the process is.
Kristi, The HR Manager, sets up groups for each team within the organization and assigns each employee to the appropriate group.
How did it improve?
Business managers can more easily create groups with different permissions and add users with tags.
Having groups instead of tiers and entities is visually more clear on how to group employees and set up different permissions for different users.
How did it do?
The groups feature is proving to be a better user experience.
93% of users no longer struggled knowing how to set up their organization and set permissions.
More intuitive and easier to set permissions and add users
Organizations being set up correctly without requiring customer support
No more confusing terminology or layout
What did we learn?
We learned positive things and where there was room for improvement.
POSITIVE TAKEAWAYS
Listening to user feedback, not just stakeholder feedback
Appropriate long term planning and roadmapping