Rhea Kulkarni

Creating User Friendly Training Modules

Team members: Oshin Nayak, Hans Lee, Tianny Lu

My Role: Initial ideation, user research, interaction design

Task

Data Driven Detroit, an organization seeking to deliver high quality information in an accessible way in order to facilitate data-backed decision making by its customers, tasked our team with creating a user-friendly training module for their open source tool: State of the Detroit Child.

The tool displays and delivers large quantities of complex data about the community, and the existing tutorial did not adequately facilitate a seamless and smooth user experience when navigating the tool.

Methods

Our first step was to analyze the existing tutorial, and identify key interaction points in order to create a breakdown of the existing user-flow

We then reviewed the existing user research and conducted stakeholder interviews to gain insight into what users liked/disliked about the tool. To then synthesize actionable insights from our research phase, we created an affinity diagram and categorized our observations.

We were finally able to take our research findings and move into the design phase. The first step was to ideate as a team, creating hand-drawn sketches and paper prototypes, which we then translated into low-fidelity wire frames.

After reviewing our sketches, we moved towards creating low-fidelity wireframes before moving into the higher-fidelity prototyping phase.

After reviewing low-fidelity paper prototypes and wireframes through hallway usability testing and peer critiques, we constructed a high fidelity prototype of the tutorial that took all of our findings and research into consideration.

Challenges

This was a valuable lesson regarding working with considerable constraints. Building a tutorial for a tool that was already launched and in use meant that we did not have much flexibility in terms of changing the design of the tool.

Therefore, although we wanted to create a solution that rebuilt the wheel and solved all apparent issues, as designers we had to not meet stakeholder needs that included not only the users, but the client as well.

This challenged us as designers to ideate and create a solution that fit within the client’s constraints, while still providing a meaningful improvement to the users

The Outcome

The final product was a high fidelity digital prototype that addressed what we saw as the most pressing usability issues with the existing tutorial. This included an indication of a user’s progress through the tutorial, the use of modules rather than pages, providing in-context tooltips, and emphasizing interactivity rather than static indicators.

This ultimately led to a tutorial that made the tool much more learnable for users and will hopefully lead to a greater rate of user retention for the client.

Click here to view the final prototype