Interaction Design

The lead developer at Commercan wanted an application that would help him to easily keep track of his billable hours by project and client. Desktop solutions were impractical and he found that he was waiting until the end of each week to collect up the time. This process was time consuming and error prone. Not finding an application that met his needs, he created a vision for his own and BeeOnTime was born.

BeeOnTime is a time tracking app designed to help you quickly track the time you spend on a project whenever and wherever you are. Instead of waiting for your computer to load or your time sheet document to open, BeeOnTime lets you track project time when you only have a minute to do so. You can track time for any project and any client in one place. BeeOnTime is able to export the time sheet for a specific time period to a spreadsheet format and deliver it to an email address. Commercan understood how important the user experience is to the success of mobile applications and contacted Analytic Design Group for help.

ADGi provided a number of services including a usability assessment, interaction design guidance, the visual design, and advice regarding user interface portability between platforms.

Playing on the "Bee" in the BeeOnTime name, ADGi suggested a honeycomb style and colour scheme. The application colours, the button icons, and the application icons were all custom created by the ADGi team. User interface elements were delivered in the specific Android format that specifies how the image is to scale in each dimension.

ADGi performed a usability assessment of the application and found several small usability issues. For example, while it was a design goal of BeeOnTime to enable the quick and easy capture of time "in the moment", the initial application required a project code to be used when entering time. ADGi recommended that a plain language project name be used instead with a project code being optional data. ADGi provided annotated wireframes to detail the proposed interaction design. Before presentation to Commercan, the basic layout was loaded onto an actual Android device to ensure that the design was easy to interact with on screen.

Other guidance provided by ADGi included advice on how to ensure a user experience that would be portable between devices. As an example, ADGi demonstrated how the calendar functionality of BeeOnTime could be modified to not only make a great Android user interface but also one that could be easily migrated to the iPhone or iPad. While the user experience should always be tailored to the user and the task at hand, our extensive experience testing smart-devices provides us with unique insight into which designs work well with all interfaces.

Lunapads is a vertically integrated manufacturer and web retailer of natural menstrual products. They primarily sell online through their website to an international clientele, with their primary market being individual women in the United States. As typical of most web retailers, the majority of visitors to their website are browsers/prospective customers and their conversion rate is approximately the industry average.

Lunapads hired ADGi to conduct user research, via a usability study, to find out what customers needed from the site and to suggest recommendations for a redesign of their website.

Working with Lunapads, ADGi defined the user segments and recruited participants for the study.

Twelve women were interviewed, each in an individual session with an ADGi facilitator, some online using an online meeting tool and some via face-to-face sessions at the ADGi office. The sessions were recorded and the facilitator watched the participant navigate through the Lunapads website. The women were given a set number of tasks to complete; however, much of the study was focused on understanding the underlying reasons and motivations for these users to get at the core reasons for why the conversions were not higher. To this end, the facilitator initiated discussion with the women during the test as well as left a lot of time to explore motivations and beliefs during the post-test interview.

We then wrote a report that contained the interview findings along with actionable and detailed recommendations for improving the website based on user feedback.

After the study was completed, Lunapads engaged ADGi to create the wireframes for the site. Armed with the extensive knowledge gained through the user research, ADGi created a set of wireframes. Working with Lunapads, the wireframes were refined through an iterative process and the final set of wireframes were delivered to Lunapads for them to work with their developers.

The TransLink site has a set of applications that it uses to provide transit information to users, collectively known as the Trip Planning tools. From TransLink’s market research team, TransLink knew that the most common reasons that users were coming to the website were to create trip plans or get trip information (bus and train schedules). However, they also knew from the customer feedback logs that many users were frustrated and/or unsuccessful at obtaining the information from the tools provided. Further, because the trip planning tool was a third-party application embedded in the TransLink site, the web logs were not capturing any information about usage, nor had the research team ever done detailed research with customers about this area of the site.

TransLink engaged ADGi to analyze the usability issues of the current tools, and to provide a redesign for them.

The Process

Since there had been little to no research done on the trip planning tools, and because they were the most highly used section of the website (over 90% of people surveyed said that they came to the site for trip information), ADGi knew that defining and analyzing the usability issues of these tools was paramount to creating the redesign.

Given the vast number of users of the site, ADGi created a user research test plan with the following components: an expert review; an online survey (to provide statistical breadth); facilitated face-to-face user testing; a request to IT to obtain the data logs from the third-party application to analyze the data that users were providing when requesting trip information.

The usability tests were conducted in 2008. ADGi provided a report and presentation on their findings to the TransLink stakeholders in early January 2009, and the information provided - particularly the videos showing real users using the tools - met with great enthusiasm and provided a solid business case for the redesign project.

The Solution

Using the information exposed during the user research ADGi provided detailed wireframes for the redesign of the Trip Planning tools. In consultation with ADGi and its internal IT teams, TransLink split the development into two phases. The first changes launched with the redesign of the TransLink site in the spring of 2009 and the majority of the changes were implemented in the fall of 2009.