During my time with the Navico research and development team, I developed wireframes with better usability standard in mind. This was a fun process of updating to a modern SharePoint look and presenting dashboard information that is more accessible.
Navico’s research and development team wanted to upgrade to the Sharepoint modern interface but did not want to change their UI due to habituation that the team developed. My goal was to not change the placement of the content but make the user interface more accessible.
The process followed simple steps through understand. I first conducted a heuristic evaluation of the project tracker and gathered user feedback with the system of the project. Then we moved to ideation through developing functional requirements to be met based on the limitations that Sharepoint modern would place on the design of the interface. Next, I developed low fidelity wireframes for the team to review through usability testing. After testing, I made the needed changes and produced high fidelity wireframes.
Above is a screenshot of the interface in Sharepoint Original. The interface had scrollable content that spilled to the side of the page. Users reported that they often did not use the information because they had to scroll past the fold.
The new dashboard interface uses what the users reported to be their most used interface categories:
The largest changes are the interface UI for consistency in health and project status reporting. We wanted to utilize dual affordances for the users. As noted by the usage of color for a projects health as well as project status.
Interestingly this UI did not change as the users wanted their data to remain the same where they could quickly access it. This is the first blocker that Sharepoint Modern placed on the team. Sharepoint Modern had a width limitation for the UI of 1240px. Due to this limitation our team had to work within the area and condense information without effecting the rest of the UI. We met with Navico’s team and explained the blocker. The users gave us feedback and determined that the most important item to not change was the placement of “Project Documents” and “Project Status Update.” So we organized content from project information and broke it down into “Project status” and moved the project manager section down.
The biggest challenge of this project was determining the limitations of Sharepoint Modern. There was interesting limitations that prevented the User Interface from being completely customizable. Users however did not report a drastic difference after the migration to the Sharepoint Modern look.
Another challenge of this project was the timeline to produce content. The turn-around time was 3 weeks. Often it was difficult to meet with the users and gain insights. Given we had no personas to base our designs from, it was difficult for the team to accurately create new content without meeting with the users so there was a major blocker.
The team wanted minor changes to the UI that helped with visibility without limiting their basic functional requirements. There was a need for constant communication with myself and the developer on the team to make sure that there was a cohesive handoff to the Navico team.
This was one of my first projects that I worked on with concurrency that revealed the disparities between academia and the corporate world. In Academia I would have time to be able to produce results for my team through established research, however given the timeline we shifted our team to a rapid prototyping and agile mode to produce results for the client. Overall I was happy with this experience because it taught me more about what can go wrong in the workplace. More specifically to be okay with timelines and communicating with customers.
