The tools available to web and app designers anchor design decisions on historical user-data, enabling them to look beyond standardized models and towards custom experiences.
Designing digital space as opposed to its physical counterpart, has created a new collaborative sensibility towards the people at the centre of our design decisions. Through Qualiant we want to extend this user-centric sensibility to the way we design our built environments.
Provide Architects and Civil Engineers meaningful insight into how a space is currently being used by its community. Enable them to better understand the present use in order to define the design of future iterations.
As the lead designer responsible for this project. I conducted multiple rounds of research, and produced sketches, wireframes, and mockups. I delivered final assets and documents, supervised development, verified the live product, and iterated again for other rounds.
The design brief is a universal component to the design processes that creates our built environment. Whilst our primary goal was to create a tool that aids the design process for all spaces - we knew we would understand our product far more thoroughly focusing on a single use case.
Workplaces offered an opportune environment to test our primary hypothesis, and we decided to proceed to design our MVP to cater to this market and its user, hoping to gain meaningful insight that can scale to aid architects and civil engineers working in various fields of the built environment.
We began the process by mapping out how spaces are designed and built. By understanding a typical project life-cycle we were able to identify the design brief’s implications on the project as a whole.
Gathering historical data from relevant sources identified through our ecosystem mapping, we were able to look at project data and observed that in an average 20-week project the design brief would undergo on average eight iterations.
This highlighted a key problem within the current process, but the reasoning behind why there were so many iterations was unclear at this phase. As such we decided to investigate further by uncovering the design team’s user flow in defining the design brief.
To draft a user flow from the design team’s perspective, we considered shadowing the team - however time constraints made it unfeasable, so instead we had them talk us through their process over a two day workshop through which we identified the key phases and personnel involved.
Our User Flow uncovered that the iterations were a result of different stakeholders joining in at different stages of the project. This led to the incorporation of new ideas and assumptions on the project's success, that were primarily based on biases embedded in different sectors of the company.
To understand the magnitude of different opinions involved at the design phase we structured a survey that intended to quantify the consensus between the different stakeholders.
1. If there are more stakeholders involved in defining the design brief - the spatial design will be better and more versed.
2. Consensus among stakeholders on the spatial requirements is low.
3. To successfully incorporate more stakeholders in the process, our primary focus should be to enable them all to reach an agreement on what the space requires.
Our key findings derived from the ecosystem mapping, user flows, and stakeholder interviews and surveys, enabled us to define both our primary and mvp hypothesis that outline the solution to our project challenge through testable outcomes.
We believe we can design more efficient and fulfilling spaces, if the users of these spaces can successfully contribute their thoughts and behaviours in defining the design brief. We aim to achieve this through a web application that captures their experience of the current space, in order to inform the design for its future use.
We believe we can design workplaces with higher occupancy and better company culture, if the employees of these spaces can successfully contribute their thoughts and behaviours in defining the design brief. We aim to achieve this through a web application that captures their experience of their current office space, in order to inform the design for its future use.
We began the design process by placing the product features within the outcomes we wanted to achieve. Using a 2 by 2 Matrix we were able to set the scope of works for our MVP, ensuring that our initial features capture both the behavior and attitude of our users through qualitative insights and qualitative validations.
Designing our MVP around this limited but holistic feature set, we knew we could get a quality product to market in the shortest possible time. A simple product that validates our core idea and provides the necessary insight on how to scale.
At the team level the Matrix offered a constant point of reference through iterations and discussion enabling our team to stay focused on the core product objectives and scope.
Our Initial wireframe for an employee centric user experience. With tight time constraints, we focused exclusively on wireframing high impact pages and key modules whose functionality needed to be laid out for our development team.
This provided enough of a direction for us to communicate the design to the necessary stakeholders whilst keeping to the tight deadline.
Using the wireframe as a starting point we were able to test several user scenarios that highlighted key opportunities to improve the user experience in the second iteration.
We found through usability testing that searching for both the space and time at the start of the user journey was creating an undesirable bottleneck. Splitting these two components reduced the time it took to find the space the users were looking for. Furthermore it increased the number of spaces users engaged with leaving more Notes and Ratings.
Interviewing our test users we also found that this new top down system architecture that let them see more than one space at any given time instance, was very helpful in aligning their navigation through the software. In particular by contrasting the specific space data to the overall stats.
Once we had a solid design direction, we began to produce high & low fidelity mockups, which would be converted into prototypes with limited functionalities. These were then used to perform iterative rounds of quantitative and qualitative user testing. While this was great because it gave the user a “polished” design to engage with, it also took a considerable amount of time to make changes (compared to rapid prototyping).
We kickstarted the Research and Feedback phase by deploying our MVP into the design phase for an office rebuild. Testing directly with our end user gave us both great usability data, as well as measurable insights into the impact of the solution we were offering.
Viewing the Final designs for the new spaces and tracing some of the innovative decisions made from validations achieved through Qualiant was a tangible high. Our MVP has in many aspects validated our assumptions within this sector of the built environment. The next step remains to continue testing our product within this industry, scaling the features and adapting the user experience to adequately support other use cases within our built environment.
Working within the framework of Lean UX Big projects and Ideas become accessible to smaller teams. This Project was a perfect demonstration of that. Our SWAT team of designers and developers took on a big and important challenge, understood it and tested it - laying strong and testable foundations at each stage ensuring the process can withstand the challenges of the next phase.
