Product: Business Intelligence Platform Roles: Sr. UX Design Year: 2020-2021
Description: Amazon QuickSight is a business intelligence platform competitive with Tableau and Microsoft Power BI. QuickSight serves hundreds of thousands of customers and provides a data visualization solution that works seamlessly on data hosted in various AWS services. I lead UX design efforts to simplify and update some of the most complex features and components.
Goals
Improve complicated workflows to improve user journeys
Derive insights from telemetry data to drive decisions
Present optional solutions to enable customer success
Phase: Discover
THE PROBLEM
The product managers and UX researchers recieved feedback from customers about frustration with a product feature to build text and graphical narratives that included insights configured from custom computations.
I worked with engineering for access then personally ran the analysis on the telemetry data and validated that customers were using narratives and a significant percentage were using narratives with insights.
PROBLEM VALIDATION
The user data analysis indicated that the success rate was unacceptably low for customers trying to add narative insights.
I then engaged the research team to identify why the success rate was so low. We discovered that many found the experience too difficult.
Phase: Define
PREPARATION
The Amazon QuickSight design team built a custom design system for the user interface but didn't have a system to easily define user flows. I first built a library of UI icons to define the current state and possible options.
CURRENT EXPERIENCE
The existing experience took customers from a modal directly into a configuration interface with very little explicit affordance to guide them to the successful creation of narrative insights.
The existing experience took customers from a modal directly into a configuration editor with very little affordance on the computation options or editing instructions.
The insight editor interface also made it difficult to view and edit multiple computations.
Phase: Design
PROPOSED EXPERIENCE
Amazon QuickSight was introduced in 2016 and iterated very quickly over the next four years with features to bring parity with competitor offerings. Modals were a popular way to expend features but by 2020 wizards and stepper interfaces were more familiar to users.
In addition to enabling explicit affordance the narrative insight creation wizard also resolved several other experience problems such as, displaying all applied computations with directional paths to adding, deleting and editting.
We conducted internal testing on protoypes of the creation wizard using the same survey questions we asked external customers. The analysis of the responses gave us a positive signal that the updated experience would lead to a more successful journey for customers wanting to use the narrative insights from custom computations feature.
–