Improving Profile Creation
Project Team: Chris Hill, Maria Situ, Sato Inokuchi
Project Summary:
With a spin-off from our parent organization on the horizon, we were focused on improving usability and KPI’s such as user count, profile creation, and account upgrades. During an evaluation project, moderated task analysis identified significant usability issues within a core profile creation workflow. Based on these findings, the project team designed and implemented several small targeted changes, leading to an increase in usability and a measurable uptick in the amount of profiles created and account upgrades in the following months.
Key Outcomes:
40% Increase in the number of profiles created in the months following the implementation
Increase in the number of upgraded accounts
Updated UI improving usability
Important Context:
The Company:
SkillsEngine is a startup and skunkworks project of TSTC, a regional technical college here in Texas. The goal of SkillsEngine is to advance prosperity through a shared understanding of skills. Their application (Builder) was designed to allow its users to access a curated library of skills so that they could create, validate, and manage skill profiles. These profiles could then be used for a number of things including, curriculum creation, job description generation or validation, job function analysis, etc.
My Role:
As a senior designer at SkillsEngine, I was tasked with defining, designing, and releasing features and functionality that would improve client acquisition. It was also my goal to improve the usability of the application as well as improve upon the processes and tools of the design team. For this project in particular, my goal was to work with the team to showcase research and evaluation techniques and demonstrate their effectiveness in lieu of more complex event tracking systems.
Project Kick Off:
With usability and KPI improvements being a priority for the company, the team sought to evaluate a key profile creation workflow within the application. The goal was to identify and prioritize potential pain points and improvements within the “search to create” workflow.
An abbreviated flow chart showing the steps to create a profile in the “Search to Create” flow
Kickoff and Discovery:
Evaluation Methods:
The decision to use task analysis for this evaluation project was made because the existing event tracking system was limited to high-level KPIs and did not provide detailed insights on user behavior throughout the application. While improving event tracking could have offered more detailed data and been a more robust solution in the long term, it would have required engineering resources and would have also delayed our ability to collect insights. Task analysis was chosen because it was cheaper, easier to implement, and allowed for direct observation of user behavior.
Task Analysis:
The study involved seven users of varying experience with our platform. These users were tasked with creating a profile using our “search to create” workflow. The scenario they were given was that they were hiring for a high school math teacher and needed to use the platform to learn more about the skills someone in that or a similar role would require. They were then supposed to create a profile to use for the hiring process.
Findings:
Our findings indicated that the “search to create” workflow was unintuitive because none of the users could complete the given task without assistance. The testing highlighted significant usability issues with the UI of the workflow and several key interactions. Examples of the issues included, confusing primary controls on the search screen, confusing interaction patterns and multi-select controls on the search results page, issues with the search results that complicated users ability to evaluate them. A confusing cart model that didn’t match user expectations, and poor system signaling leading to confusion around profile creation.
A deliverable showing the pain points and opportunities discovered during research
Prioritization and Proposals:
After sharing out the results of testing with leadership, the team began to prioritize the pain points identified so that we could begin designing and proposing solutions. In regards to prioritization, there was a desire to avoid any large changes that may introduce instability into the platform. With that in mind, the team worked with engineering and focused on what we called the “painful low-hanging fruit”. Design work would then focus on the search homepage and search results page with other potential fixes coming at a later date.
A deliverable showing prioritized pain points and opportunities
Iterations and Handoffs:
Search Page:
For the search home page, we wanted to focus on two primary changes. Removing a confusing browse button that often led to irrelevant search results and changing the ordering of tabs on the search page in order to emphasize an “Import to create” workflow as opposed to the current “Search to create” workflow. The browse button work was a simple removal and didn’t require much in the way of design work or engineering consultation. The change to the tab required a similar level of effort. Because the import to create workflow was already built, released, and functioning, all we needed to do was swap the ordering of the tabs so that users would encounter that workflow first by default on the homepage.
On the left we see the previous search page arrangement and on the right we see the updated import first option
An abbreviated flow chart showing the steps to create a profile in the “Search to Create” flow
An abbreviated flow chart showing the steps to create a profile in the “Import to Create” flow
Search Results:
The focus for this portion of the workflow was on improving our users ability to evaluate and interact with search results. With that in mind, we started exploring a new result UI that would allow for longer description copy, improved visual hierarchy, and additional controls. The process began with some sketches (see fig 1) before moving on to an engineering consultation to better understand the feasibility of the proposed improvements. After a greenlight from engineering, high fidelity mockups and annotations were created for hand off (see fig 2).
fig 1. Sketches showing exploration of new interaction and content UI for search result updates
fig 2. abbreviated hand off for search result UI update
Outcomes
The implemented work from this project resulted in a 40+% increase in the number of profiles created in the following months. Additionally we also saw a slight uptick in the amount of upgraded accounts (+2). While there was still much work to be done in terms of addressing the other areas of concern uncovered during testing, our small targeted interventions were a considerable start and allowed users to continue to create profiles.