For this project, our team needed to come up with a concept for a built-in analytics experience. Existing tools that let users analyze their data were difficult to access and inconsistently implemented. This new feature would tie those tools together, and it would also allow us to quickly build new tools that would be consistent with the rest of the application.
When telling the user’s story it’s important to walk in their shoes as often as possible, because every time we walk through the user’s journey we have another opportunity to revise our understanding of that story. This is true whether we’re in the initial ideation phase, or testing if something we’ve built works as we intended.
In order to keep us focused on the user’s journey, I drew up storyboards that showed the user analyzing one type of situation. I started with our personas and worked with the UX lead and Product Managers to settle on the story.
Summary
We referred to these throughout the concept creation process. They informed pain points, interaction decisions, and opportunities for improvement.
This project required a quick turnaround; we had 17 days to develop the end-to-end concept. These were intentionally rough, quick drawings – I knew that we would iterate on this path as we learned more. We would have wasted time polishing these. Instead, we used that time to better understand the journey and iterate on it.