Case Study One

Risk Management

This Case Study was a time and resource heavy project so we applied the Design Thinking Framework. The potential feature could be the dot on top of the 'i' to make Dataminr Pulse an end to end platform for critical risk management. The timeline for UX was 6 weeks (3 sprints) and we had a multi-disciplinary team of ten.

Let's get into it

Disclaimer: Please be advised that this project contains sensitive information, and some parts of the details might be hidden. If you have specific questions regarding my process, please contact me at pete.w.hazell@gmail.com.

_Overview

01/ Context

The App

Dataminr Pulse is a real-time AI platform for event and risk detection.

Informing our clients of risk to their assets, by detecting the earliest signals of high-impact events and emerging risks from within publicly available data.

With the use of Salesforce and our Customer Service team we obtain feedback from our users to guide us to design new features.

Always being cognisant of the efficiency of the app.

My role

Principal Product Designer: I was asked to help lead a team to discover and ideate a new module to help us craft an end to end solution.

Skills: quantitative and qualitative UX research, persona, data, analytics, field research, competitor analysis, user interviews, affinity mapping, user scenarios, observational study, storyboarding, scenario mapping, usability testing, user-centered approach

Tools: Figma, Photoshop, Invision, MIRO, whiteboarding

The Team

As the Principal Product Designer I collaboratively led a team, designing, mentoring and advising.

I was also the main indivdual contributor and built all the engineering flows.

A working team of 8, 3 designers (including myself), 1 UX researcher, 2 product managers and 2 engineers.

Every Monday we discussed the week before, planned the week ahead and organised/aligned tasks for each member.

_The Problem

02/ Understanding the problem

The User

We heard via multiple channels that our users were delighted with our Alerting platform and confirming we were fastest around. However once they have the Alert they are obliged to leave Dataminr Pulse platform in order to respond to the incident. We knew our users were seeking a single pane of glass or end to end solution. Meaning they want a platform that handles their Monitoring use case but also their React & Collaborate use case.

The Business

We were losing revenue potential and the possibility of clients leaving because the app did not support a workflow after the monitoing phase of critical risk managment. We needed to find a way to make our platform the single pane of glass that the users had asked for in turn making our app sticky, keeping our users on our platfom for the end to end journey of monitoring and reacting to risks to their business.

_The Process

03/ The Users

Research Strategy.

The first thing we focused on was our research strategy. In order to identify the types of functionality/features needed to support our users. We conducted some usability interviews with some willing customers.

Before begining our interviews we first needed to do two things:

Firstly we conducted a competitor analysis in the incident management space. This gave us an insight in the market and provided additional context for the problem we had to resolve.

Secondly we created interview questions in preparation for usability interviews.

Competitor Analysis.

In total we looked at 4, Topo.ai, Everbridge, Alert Media and Factal.

We found out quite a few pieces where we could be better:

Cluttered UI, excessive noise due to ‘over’ featuring, different level of features for different packages, confusing flow, confusing content placement and grouping of features/placements seemed unintuative.

Distilled feedback.

Users want to be able to PLAN for upcoming events (like the soccer World Cup)
Users want to be able to MONITOR
Users want to be able to RECORD retrospectively
Users want to be able to COLLABORATE as a team
Users want to be able to export reports
Users want to be able create templates for tasks, events and to be able to customise these easily

_The Process

04/ The Problem

_The Process

05/ Prototype

Note: This project was a huge feature, below are highlights of how I worked. As stated in the disclaimer above some of this material is sensitive so I can't show too much detail. I can show and talk to this in more detail in person, please contact me at pete.w.hazell@gmail.com

_The Process

06/ Test & Iterate

Testing

We tested with 2 groups of 5 users (GSOC manager + Watch officers) across all demographics.

We had 3 flows:

Measure the usability, findability of the create flow
Measure the usability, findability of the functionality in Risk Management
Measure the usability, findability of the admin/settings flow (GSOC Manager only)
We also tested terminology throughout all the above.

We built the required flows to test and the scripts to make sure we were consistent in our findings.

Key Takeaways.

From our user tests I summed up the key takeaways (there were many other takeaways).

4/5 users were confused with the terminology around the single entity (project) within risk management
4/5 users didn’t understand the customisable scale to allow them to classify each single entity as per their current procedures.
3/5 users during this test didn't connect the tasks in the overview with the tasks in the board
3/5 didn’t understand the term ‘board’ we needed to relook at being more direct with this term
Generally the flows and findability of areas were intuitive

What now?

After collating all feedback, we reiterated the prototype to test again (there were also many other changes we made):

Replacing terminology from the feedback
We added some info tooltips of customisable scale and gave good defaults so the examples would be clearer
We used the term ‘Task Board’ to help users understand the navigation item better
We tested more use case flows to be 100% sure the mental model was right for our users

What we learned?

As we know the design process doesn't stop here, Product Design is not a linear process. We are constantly reliving the testing loop to make sure we are refining this experience to make it the best it can be for our users.

After much more of the above we released a new module called Risk Management. The result was an increase in revenue with new customers onboarded, but also increasing upsells from current customers and retaining accounts which were on the fence to leave.