Aurelius Insights
Feature Prioritization Research, Journey Mapping, Feature Design
Summary
Discovery research/design exploring roadmap priorities for new-feature development.
Aurelius’ had set aside budget for development of a new, user-feature but had not yet decided what to build. Wanting to ensure their investment would also increase adoption/retention of users we;
Conducted user research with current-customers to understand existing pain-points within their workflows
Tested our new design concepts (in a Kano Analysis framework) to ensure "value delivered” to the customers
Integrated the concept into existing experience and design library
The Problem Space
Aurelius is a web tool for UX researchers to organize, collect and gain insight from their data.
In its current state, Aurelius users are transposing their data into presentation tools, like Powerpoint/Keynote in order to share their work with clients, developers, their own internal teams. This step is both time-consuming and often leaves users feeling like they're doing double duty on this data they've already spent time organizing.
UX designing a UX tool created by a UX designer for UX researchers.
UXing a UX tool made by a UX designer for UX researchers.
Aurelius is already clearly well-considered when it comes to its design patterns. You can dig as deep as you need to into your data, you can search your data in meaningful ways, it even facilitates the gleaning of insights from your data. Most importantly and unsurprisingly, the UX researchers using the tool put a lot of value in the tools flexibility and attention to usability throughout.
While integrating a new, high-level data organization feature, we balanced tech constraints provided by Aurelius' sole developer.
Balancing these tech constraints and a time budget, I researched & prototyped a high-level data organization/presentation feature aimed at eliminating the need to leave Aurelius' to create presentations.
Aurelius has several high-level features in the works. We were designing a new over-arching organization structure, "Collections".
Researchers are constantly sharing their work, using their data to justify design choices, sending reports and recommendations to both external and internal team members. These Collections are meant to eliminate the transposition of data already in Aurelius to an outside presentation application; powerpoint, keynote, pdfs. Aurelius strength lies in its connectedness to raw research data. Users can always trace an insight back to its supporting evidence. Transposing this data out of Aurelius weakens this platform and under-utilizes its functionality. With only ONE developer, prioritizing which features to build and considering how these will be rolled out (and iterated on) within our allotted development time became a key focus throughout the project.
Current User Flow
New Feature Flow
Strategizing is knowing what not to do.
Balancing the development time with user value to maximize our own designs.
After mocking up an over-abundance of problem-solving features, we scoped them with Aurelius' developer to discover which features would be most effective and achievable within our time frame of 160 development hours. We combined a few of our features and sent them out to Aurelius users for a qualitative analysis of users value for specific features, Kano Analysis. They were asked to make a value judgement based on how they would feel if the feature was present, and if it was absent.
From those results we were able to plot out these features into essential features, non-essential but exciting features and features that are non-desirable for current users.
