• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

UXwanabe

Learn how to get into UX and grow your design career

  • Home
  • Blog
  • Podcast
  • About

UX

Case study — Redesign Template feature for GoAnimate

October 17, 2016 by Tim Chan

GoAnimate is an online platform that enables people to create professional-looking videos — from scratch — using drag and drop tools. It helps businesses and consumers to tell their stories in an engaging and cost-effective way.

In GoAnimate, there is a feature called “Template” where user can drag & drop a ready made scene with backgrounds and characters included in it. This saves users time to create a scene from scratch.

A Sample of GoAnimate templates for the HR category

Since the launch of the Template feature, we were happy to find out that a lot of users quickly adapted to use Templates to help them create videos more quickly. However, through watching user testing videos, we have identified a few usability issues we would like to address.

My role

I was the lead UX designer for this project, and worked along side with another UX designer and one engineer. I executed user-testing sections, interaction desgins, user journeys, wireframes, prototypes and design specs.

The Process

Understanding the problem

We ran 6 rounds of user testing sections through Usertesting.com, below is a summary of usability issues we identified based on user testing sections:

1. Lack of visual hierarchy. Since Templates and assets (individual items such as props and characters) were grouped together visually, some users had mistakenly identified certain Templates as an asset to be added on the stage.

Text templates and text components (3d icon from right) were put together which confused one of our testers.

For example, one user has mistaken a Text template as a way to add text to the scene. Hence, when they click on that template, everything that is currently shown on the scene is replaced by that Text template. Although this the correct behavior for selecting a Template, but not what the user was expecting. As we can hear verbally from the user how confused she was.

2.Difficult to navigate between Templates categories. With the old UI, users had to choose a Template category very carefully, because if they cannot find what they need in one category, the only way to browse another category is to click the Back button and select another category.

Current design of Templates, user had to choose a category carefully or they will be force to hit Back multiple times.

Imagine you were on hunting mode, where you really wanted to find something urgently, and you had to hit Back multiple times because each category you clicked did not contain what you want. It starts to become irritating very quickly. In short, the old deign has high interaction cost which a good design should always try to avoid.

Understanding stake-holder needs

Apart from serving our user needs, it is also important to take into account different stake-holder needs. Our marketing team said that they wanted a way to promote certain templates based on seasonal (e.g. Christmas specific) or user’s job roles in order to give users a more personalized experience. With that in mind, I sketched out the user and marketing needs on a whiteboard and shared that with the team.

Stake-holders need brain storm section

Setting the North Star

Before we started to work on anything, we needed some guiding principles that everyone can agree upon. This helps us to evangelize ideas, gain alignment and drive decision making.

When we asked our users why they chose to use our tool instead of our competitors, many pointed out that “Using Goanimate is much quicker”. Indeed speed is a feature on its own. We quickly decided that speed is the number one thing that we should care the most.

Everything that we were going to work on will be about helping users to create their first video in a shortly manner. Our design must be able to promote featured templates without slowing the user down.

Sketching out the User Journey

We want to understand what challenges a new user might face when they first came to our tool, sketching the joruney out helps us to identify area that users might need help with. These helps may came in any form (micro copy, contextual help..etc)

A user journey on what a user might went through

Brain storming ideas

It took us a long time to find the right solution because every sketch I made seems to not satisfy our goal, which was to:

  1. Have a clear Hierarchy.
  2. Easy to navigate between templates.
  3. Able to promote certain templates.

In the end, something sticks. We took queue on browsers tabs designs, where the tabs will be our categories. It is easy to navigate between tabs and we can pin certain tabs just like in browser to promote some templates.

A collection of sketches to brain-storm the template idea

Paper prototype & Interaction design

We quickly jumped into creating a paper prototype to test out our ideas. We cut out the pieces to help us understand where the template menu should belong in terms of structure and layers, where it would come from when summoned and where it would go..etc.

Paper prototype illustrating structures and layers

Interaction design

I used Atomic to create an interaction design prototype and presented it to the team to communicate how the template menu should behave. I collected feedback and did a few variations. Below is the final design:

Template menu summoning interactions

Functional prototype

We worked alongside with our engineers to create a working prototype. We presented this prototype to our stake-holders, including our CEO, while explaining the problems we are trying to solve and how this designing is the right solution. Once we got everyone on board, we then moved on to create the real thing.

A functional prototype to communicate our design direction

Functional specifications

At this stage I prepared a document called “Functional specifications”, it documents how the feature is suppose to behave and also the design decisions we made along the way.

Some designers advocate on not writing specs and prefer to use wire-frames and prototypes as the final spec. I am also not a big fan of heavy spec, however I find the process of writing the spec forces to me to think about the problem more clearly. Flawed logic is also easier to discover when you put the interactions into words because you are not distracted by anything fancy.

The final product

Below is the final product and the problem it addressed:

1. Clear Hierarchy

We have moved the Template menu to the bottom of the UI, shown when user clicks the Add scene button or click the Swap scene button. With this new UI, the case where users mistreat Template as an asset and accidentally replacing the current scene will no longer happen.

Putting Templates at the bottom makes the adding scene interaction much more intuitive because users are most likely to want to see templates when they want to add a new scene (Triggered by clicking on the Adds scene button). The Template menu now show up when users need it and stay out of their way when it is not.

New UI for selecting templates

2. Easy to navigate between categories

We have introduced a Tab feature that works very similar to a browser tab, users can easily navigate between categories they care without the speed bump from the old design. They can also customize their work space to show only Template categories that are relevant to them, and hide those that are not.

Tab design for easy browsing between categories
User can customize what categories to shown

3. Addressed the marketing need

We don’t want first time users to be overwhelmed by the number of Template categories out there. Hence, by default, we only show a few starter categories, or categories for promotion to help users quickly get started. This approach helps to promote certain categories without coming as too “salesy”.

A set of starter categories helps users to get start quickly

User testing follow up

We ran a few more user testing follow ups to see how well the new design went compared to the old one. We were happy to see that all users were able to distinguish the difference between templates and other assets. The starter templates helped the users to easily get started and they had no difficulties navigating between templates.

Running user testing sections to test out the new template design

Results

While I cannot show you the sales number, one of the things that made me proud of my job is seeing how customer appreciate the work we put out there. Below are some of the praise that we receive since the launch of this project.

“Sweet mercy the new editor is AMAZING! The level of fine-grain control that we have over elements now is fantastic, and the intuitiveness and responsiveness of the interface is fantastic as well!”

“I’m liking the new alpha video maker format. Particularly the time line which makes it easier to visualize the sequence of actions than the older format.”

“Just by the interface alone it is night and day better…”

“ know using it is at our own peril since it’s Alpha, but I’m already using it for production level videos because of how much more streamlined and powerful the new editor is. Fantastic job GoAnimate, you’ve raised the bar once more!”

“I have so much to say! So many things! I’ve been using new UI/UX for about an hour and overall I’m in love! … Anyway, The timeline improvements are huge.”

“User friendly, clear extra simple, but still great quality & tools”

“Hi, congratulation for created great new platform design for testing, which is more light, easy and well organized timeline.”

Lesson learned

Confession time: we actually created the North star (or the design vision) after we started designing the UI. I decided to put it this way in the portfolio because it is easier to follow.

At first, I thought the requirements were very clear and there is no need for a design vision. It didn’t take us long to hit a bottle neck, as the design was going nowhere. Non of us were happy about our sketches because it couldn’t address all our requirements.

It is until we went through a lot of debates and it became apparent we must align our vision. Things started to go smoothly afterwards and we can finally come up with a design that everyone is happy about.

In short: Never cut corners or you will always suffer in the end!


Thank you for reading.

Filed Under: Case study Tagged With: Design, Interaction Design, Portfolio, Product Design, UX

Case study — Information Architecture for GoAnimate

October 17, 2016 by Tim Chan

GoAnimate is an online platform that enables people to create professional-looking videos — from scratch — using drag and drop tools. It removes the pain of traditional time-consuming production process by providing pre-made props and templates.

With 10,000+ props in their library that were categorized poorly and with very basic search capability, GoAnimate users had a hard time looking for what they want. GoAnimate needed a better way to organize their contents and improve their search experience, this is were I came in.

A screenshot for the content library

My role

Research and design information architecture, produce tagging and metadata guidelines for content creators, and designed functional spec on improving the searching experience. I was the lead UX designer for this project, and collaborated closely with the content team and one engineer.

The Process

Understanding the existing system

Before I start, I wanted to fully understand why the problem existed in the first place. I did in-depth interviews with the content team to gain a better understanding on how they work.

The biggest problem I uncovered was that there were no guidelines on how contents should be categorized. Each team member will organize contents based on their own feelings. No wonder why contents are scattered along the place. On top of that, the search engine only supported search by file names, which was a really limited experience.

Break down the problem

There are 3 big problems I need to answer:

  1. When should a concept become a category? For example, for an Office table, should it belong to a category called Office or Corporate? Why and why not? What about Furniture?
  2. How to make the categorizaton scheme scalable? I want to create a scheme that not only support what we have currently, but can also support new contents in the future.
  3. How can I make an item retrievable by using multiple keywords? For example, I want to find a Macbook. If I search Mac, Laptop, Electronics or Apple I expect to be to find my Macbook. How do I make that happen?

Research — Understand how human organize information

I knew my problem was not unique, the challenge of organzing information has existed way before I became an UX designer. I decided to do some research on how other people has solved this problem.

Since our library covers a lot of concepts, my research needed to cover a wide range of topics as well. I looked at product based categorisation systems such as ebay, Amazon, Walmart…etc, and activity based such as Meetup.com. I also looked at library classification schemes across the world to have a better understanding on how human classify knowledges. Lastly, I also looked at government websites, yellow page and other recruiting website to understand how we categorize job functions.

Researching different categorization scheme, even yellow page!

I decided that item exists in multiple categories would make most sense to our tool. For concepts that does not have the privilege to become a category, we will use them as tags for search engine retrieval. Below is a sketch on how I was brain-storming how we can categorize a character:

Brain storming how I might want to tag a character

Research part 2— Conduct card sorting exercise

We invited test 3 participants to our office for Open-ended card sorting exercises. We observe how they group things logically together and asked a lot of questions to understand why they chose to group things a certain way. I noted there are similarities between the participants and used that as a guide to create the categorization scheme.

Participant is conducting open-ended card sorting exercise
Card sorting exercise analysis
Brain storm how we can categoize items based on results from card-sorting exercise

Create categorization guideline

Based on the results from the card sorting exercise, I created a categorization guideline internally on how to categorize items inside our library. The guideline went through a few changes afterwards to cover more topics and make the wordings more clear.

This guideline gives us a unify understanding on how contents should be categorized. Instead of debating which content should go under which category, it saves time for the content team to do things that is their expertise — to create remarkable contents.

We also worked with the development team to design an admin UI that allows the admin user to easily assign categories:

Admin UI to assign categories to items

Search

Reusing left-overs

As we are only interested to offer user no more than 30 categories to avoid overwhelming them with choices, not every category name we came up with made it to the final cut.

Those categories names exists because that there is more than one way to categories something, which means that those terms is perfect for us to use as tags which will help us with the search.

Tagging

Search engine retrieves information through meta-data, also known as tags (e.g. hash-tag # in Instagram). It helps the search engine to understand that an item carries multiple meaning. Fundamentally, tag is a category.

It is easy to tag 1 or 2 items, but when you are tagging 10,000+ items, things start to become tricky. You will start to miss some important tags or you will start to over tag, either way, the process is not efficient.

Importance of guidelines

To ensure that each item has good quality tags, I came up with a set of guidelines on how we should tag items, the team has to consider 3 questions for every items:

  1. What is this item.
  2. Where can you find this item.
  3. What does it represents.

The tags will start from specific concepts and gradually move towards more generic ideas. For example, and “Office chair” will have tags the looks something like: Chair → Office → Work…

Guideline on how to tag an item

Other considerations — Variance terms

Language is a tricky thing, there are different words that actually mean the same thing. For example, Cell phone or Mobile Phone refers to that thing you can call people while walking down the street.

To avoid spending time to come up with variations of terms duplicate tagging, we grouped words with similar concept or meanings together. We chose one term — the Controlled term — as the tag we will used internally. Other variations are called Variance terms.

The control term table is very simple spreadsheet file. One column is the control term, and the other columns are the variance terms:

With this Controlled terms table, we don’t have over tag just in case we might miss some keywords.

Now when user search the variance terms, since variance terms and controlled terms are linked, we will be able to return results.

Improving the search experience — Front end level

After I have designed how we can come up with tags and how it would work in the backend, I started to look for some micro-interactions that can improve the search experience. Below are interactions I added:

Search suggestion saves time for user to find keywords
  1. As users types in the search box, provide suggestions based on what he is typing. This helps us to a) educate the user what items we have and b) save the user’s time by making him typing less. Also added arrow keyboard shortcut to help user easily navigate between the suggestions.
  2. Offer typo tolerance such that users do not have to worry if they misspelled something.
  3. Bold the matched text.

Documentation

At this stage, I created a detail document that describes how the search engine works both in the font-end and in the back-end (The algorithm). I worked with the development team to refining the wording multiple times and make sure there is no ambiguity in how we want to make this project work.

The result

The project didn’t just end just because I shipped the feature. Good search experience requires continuous fine-tune and follow up. I set up a review cycle every 2 weeks to understand how well we were doing for the new search engine. We were mostly interested in 2 things:

  • Search term that is “valid” but returning 0 results. This means that the term should return results since the item exist in the library.
  • Search term that was used a lot but return 0 results because the item searched doesn’t exist in the library.
Sample of a search analysis report
Search report on the first few week of the new search engine

Based on the search log, I was able to make some fine-tune on the search experience. For example, we were able to identify items that were searched a lot but was not tagged and also identify the need to add more contents since users were looking for it.

What we planned to do in the future

We had plans to do the following tasks, which I think is going to bring the search experience to a higher level, but in the end I have to drop the features due to time-constrains.

  1. Auto ranking adjustment. Create an automatic system such that, when an item is more popular than others, we will give that item more weight, so it will show up closer to top in the search results.
  2. Create a thesaurus library. A thesaurus library defines the closeness of each terms. Which means apart from the regular search results we show to our users, we can also present relative search results, something very common in the e-commerce world. E.g. “You may be interested to this…”

Reflection and lesson learned

Through out this project, my biggest learning was to understand the concept of Controlled Terms and Variance Terms.

As I was working side by side with the content team, we faced the challenge of constantly thinking of variations of a concept, and try to put all those variations as tags. Things starts to become messy as some items will have like 30 tags because of the team trying to cover every possible keyword we can think of.

It is after I picked up the book: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web — aka, the polar bear book which taught me the concept of Controlled Terms and Variance Terms and the art of organizing information, things start to change and went more smoothly.

My biggest take away is that, although some books are really boring, sometimes you just need to bite the bullet and read it. After all, knowledge is power!


Thank you for reading.

Filed Under: Case study Tagged With: Information Architecture, Portfolio, Search Engines, UX

10 steps to become an UX designer, guaranteed

September 21, 2016 by Tim Chan

April’s fool special

Let’s face it, nowadays anyone can become an UX designer, even your grandma. For those that hasn’t make it yet, no offence, but you just need to try harder. Alternatively, you can learn from pros who made it (that’s me btw). If you are fresh out and want to become an UX designer quickly, this guide is for you.

1.Stop reading “UX books”. Most website says there a few must reads if you want to become an UX designer, I say screw that, books are for old people and losers. We want to become an UX designer fast and we ain’t got no time to learn these crap. We are looking for quick wins here. That’s why we should…

2. Join any UX course. The beauty of UX courses is that it covers a lot of keywords, such as Wireframe, Persona, User journey…etc. Those keywords are exactly what our future employers are looking for. It doesn’t matter whether the course is well recognized or not. The UX field is too new to be judged by anyone, simply joining a course sends the message to our potential hire that we are serious about this shit.

3.Create a portfolio out of thin-air. Another great thing of joining an UX course is that you always end up creating a portfolio as a deliverable. In terms of what kind of project you should do, a simple rule of thumb is to pick a well recognized website and do a redesign for it. Whether the current website has any problem or not is irrelevant, just redesign it anyway.

4. Create a visually appealing portfolio. Some so-called UX guru said that UX ≠UI. Don’t listen to that nonsense. We all know UX and UI are the same thing. That’s why we are going to spend a lot of time making the portfolio look as graphically appealing as possible. If you are stuck on how to make it look great, here is a tip: Change the fonts to Helvetica Neue. You can thank me later.

5. Use fake persona. Since all our time were spent on making the portfolio look pretty, we don’t really have time to talk to users and do this Persona thing. To get around this, we use one of the greatest tool mankind has ever invented — Imagination. All you need to do is to imagine your user’s needs and goals, and voila! You just made yourself a Persona, it is that easy.

6. Print a name card and call yourself Freelance UX designer. Believe it or not — by definition — anyone who has a portfolio that contains a wireframe is regarded as an UX designer. Which means you are legit now. This is the part where you need to start printing name cards and let everyone know that the big boy(or girl) is in town.

7. Update your LinkedIn title into Freelance UX designer. This is a no-brainer. Just like any romantic relationships, you are not official until you are “Facebook official”. You are not a real freelance UX designer until you have updated your LinkedIn profile.

8. Go to meetups. Everyone knows that networking is important. Ignore the fact that half of the people there whines about their jobs all the time while the other half are unemployed. This is the price to pay to become part of the cool and vibrant design community. Plus, it gives you a great opportunity to expand your network by handing out the 500 name cards you printed earlier to anyone you meet.

9. Apply to any jobs with the word UX attached to it. Since our goal is to become an UX designer quickly. What the company does or whether they understand UX is irrelevant. Some company are obviously looking for UI designers when they said they are looking for UX designers. Because we know that UX and UI is the same thing, this makes us a perfect fit.

10. Throw keywords out during the interview. This is the easy part, as mentioned, UX is a very new field. The hiring manager probably has no idea what your job duty is, so all you have to do is to tell him how much you care about the user. If he is not impressed yet, toss keywords such as: User centric design, Wireframes, User Research, Persona…etc. The hiring manager will be amazed on how knowledgeable you are. After that, it is just a matter of time they will call you for an offer.

So class, this concludes our 10 simple steps to become an UX designer, hope that helps and good luck!

Filed Under: Funny Tagged With: Design, Job Hunting, UX, UX Design, Ux Strategy

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3

Primary Sidebar

UXwanabe newsletter

About

Hi, I am Tim Chan, I want to help 10,000 people get into UX!

Previously, I spent 4 years working as a Product Design Lead at HSBC.

I’ll share my experiences, mindset & strategies on how to climb the design ladder on my newsletter.

Recent Posts

  • 2022 in Review
  • 10 Lessons I learned working in a global bank as a designer
  • Evidence based imposter syndrome framework
  • Graduate advice for UX students
  • How to plan a successful career in UX
Copyright ©2023 UXwanabe · All rights reserved