Our team of 2 designers created a total of 30+ screens that helped reduce visual clutter and enhanced categorization of various reports types which in turn resulted in faster task completion.
The website was still in its developmental stage of building the interface and the backend infrastructure. We are tasked to build off of previous designs to give it a new look and feel. Our goal was to tackle usability issues while maintaining consistent branding. We conducted an initial heuristic evaluation and unmoderated usability tests with early adopters and people around us to identify critical usability issues.
To better understand the website's functionality and the current user pain points, we conducted a heuristic evaluation across all pages and documented areas that could potentially affect a user's experience on Figma. Since it is a system designed specifically for sheep farmers, it needs to be an accessible, easy-to-use, and straightforward solution that could be incorporated into their daily operations.
Through this process, we also had the chance to learn more about livestock management and explore the intersectionality between emerging technologies and agriculture.
Below is a screen of us reviewing the existing website and doing a heuristic evaluation on all pages.
The goal of this initial usability testing was to help the team identify critical usability issues. Considering the short timeframe of this project and the large number of pages that needed an uplift to the existing look and feel, this helps us prioritize areas of the interface that should be addressed first.
12 participants consisting of our acquaintances and early system adopters were asked to complete an unmoderated usability test. The 3 tasks were as follows:
1. Sign up for an account
2. Register a new sheep
3. Create an Export Report
Our findings revealed 3 important issues:
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Our team of 2 UX designers worked on 30+ screens and created new designs for the current interface. We held daily meetings and co-design sessions to brainstorm ideas and evaluate each other's design decisions.
Leading the second round of usability test on our prototype, we wanted to figure out if our re-designs are successfully tackling the above challenges faced by our participants and to validate our design decisions.
To understand how users will be interacting with this web app and help deliver a new and improved product, we had meetings with product managers and tried to learn more about how sheep farmers manage their livestock data and the challenges with the traditional paper-based solution they have been using. It is no easy task to track sheep and enter data due to the varying weather conditions and the fact that most of the time sheep farmers are working outdoors. If given more time, it would be a valuable experience to conduct in-depth interviews to get a better sense of their struggles in their daily operation and how a digitalized experience could streamline their work.
Within our 3-months term, we were tasked to work on revamping the website to make it visually appealing and the two of us created new designs for all of the existing pages ( >30 pages in total). Despite our daily standups with cross-functional team members including AI engineers, developers, and QA engineers, we did not fully get the chance to test the functionality and technical feasibility of our design sketches. We could have better involved developers during our usability testing sessions and have them provide technical feedback during the design process to make sure we are having as many conversations as possible.
We conducted our usability test over Maze, an online platform where participants are guided through the process of completing the tasks on their own computers. It is easier to collect data this way but does not fully capture the user behaviour including expressions, body language and limits our ability to ask personalized follow-up questions.
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