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Co-op team project with 4 other designers at WSIB Innovation Lab
UX Designer
Jan 2023 - Feb 2023
(2 months)
Client information is inaccessible to certain divisions/roles, various resources are used to find and record information and different communication methods are used between divisions and employees.
As a UX Designer co-op student at the WSIB innovation lab, I was tasked to execute user testing and implement design changes for a centralized employer dashboard PoC created to solve this problem and streamline WSIB corporate employee workflow.
An improved centralized employer dashboard PoC that contains a holistic 360 view of customers with the goal of streamlining the WSIB employee’s workflow.
The first step in the testing process was creating a testing plan which outlined our goals, KPIs and methods. it was decided to conduct both moderated and unmoderated testing in order to best capture both qualitative and quantitative feedback.
Uncover any user pain points and measure desirability and usability of the employer dashboard PoC for future corporate adoption
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Since the initial design work was mostly complete by previous co-ops, this stage consisted of tying any of the loose ends including creating and finalizing components, prototyping interactions and addressing other developer team needs while conducting internal lab team voting to help finalize design decisions.
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A total of 24 WSIB corporate employees from various departments representing different personas participated in the testing sessions.
The moderated user tests encompassed usability interviews where users were given tasks to complete on a call and followed up by clarifying questions to understand the paths they took to complete the task and any pain points that arose along the process.
While the moderated tests were being conducted, unmoderated tests were carried out through surveys hosted on Maze and sent for participants to complete on their own time. Here, similar task-based questions as the user interviews were tested with the addition of SUS questions to quantitatively measure the usability of the current version of the PoC if adopted. Other metrics automatically recorded by Maze such as the task success rate were also used to measure the success of the solution and highlight further areas of improvement.
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Insights from each participant were extracted to sticky notes and then grouped using affinity mapping to visualize and derive any pain points in the current stage of the PoC. These pain points were also used as a source for recommendations which were separated and prioritized based on two groups: recommendations to be implemented for the final delivery of PoC1 and recommendations that should be considered for future PoCs or production.
After outlining recommendations and confirming feasibility of changes with the development team, we went straight into implementing these changes in the prototypes. Due to the timelines for the PoC, only smaller design changes could be implemented for the PoC1 delivery while the rest were reserved based on the future adoption of the solution.
One of the major pieces of content reorganization was based on the sections displayed on the main dashboard. Since all the information is combined into one view, it is important to also consider the organization of it that best suits each persona using the dashboard. Therefore, recommendations and changes were made to ensure that the content is grouped under headings and areas that make the most sense.
An example of a change made based on feedback included moving the “Address and Region” section of the dashboard closer to the top of the page as that information of an employer would often be accessed by a variety of WSIB employees.
Although the data grouping and job shadowing sessions conducted by previous co-ops when creating the initial designs helped with outlining the basic pieces of information and terminology used by WSIB employees, there were still areas of discrepancies in the wording of content based on the user’s understanding and their team lingo.
An example of a change made based on this feedback included rewording “Account ID” to “Account Number” as that was what was currently used in the WSIB internal platforms. This is also something noted to be worked on further with other aspects of the dashboard to ensure consistency with what the employees are currently used to.
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Another common piece of feedback was that the navigation between the dashboard and landing pages was not intuitive. The logo was made to navigate back to the landing page, however, not many participants understood this and expected a clearer indication of a home button. This was especially confusing as the home icon was also used in the side navigation bar for the dashboard, with users initially clicking that to go back to the landing page.
To improve this, a home icon was included by the logo to visually indicate that clicking on that would lead back to the landing page. Further, the side navigation bar home icon was changed to avoid confusion
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One of the major findings that was explored during PoC1 but required more time and iterations were the redesign of the flags in the dashboard page. From the user testing, it was concluded the flags used in the dashboard were confusing, with the participants mistaking them to be clickable content. Improving the ways the flags are displayed as well as rewording content in the flags are the next steps to improve the understanding of the flags and their purpose.
Some of the other findings that couldn’t be addressed for PoC1 but are planned for future PoCs are as follows -
This was my first time working with such a big team of designers (5 people!). Due to this, one of the most important lessons I learned was that of effective collaboration in order to improve the designs while still meeting deadlines. This experience also helped reinforce the best way to conduct user interviews; avoiding leading questions and also understanding that things that might seem obvious might not always seem obvious to everyone (eg: using the logo to navigate to the home page).
Due to the time constraints, there were still aspects of the project that could be improved and design changes left to be made. Some of these next steps include -
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