MAG Events Panel
MAG Events Panel
Mark Anthony Group is a wine and spirits company based in Vancouver. They operate globally supplying restaurants, retailers and wine boutiques. Every six months they hold a weekend-long conference for all their sales representatives and product suppliers to meet, network and stay up to date on the status of the company.
Challenge
B.P.M. Integrations, a supplier of CRM solutions for for MAG group had been contracted to provide an application creation platform that allowed MAG to build custom event mobile apps. Having built and deployed this platform, MAG returned to BPM with complaints about its usability. I was contracted to assist in discovering these experience issues and in the subsequent redesign required to address them.
client
Mark Anthony Group, BPM Integrations
Role
UX Design
UI Design
Solutions
DEFINING THE PROBLEM
The platform was analysed against a set of heuristics taken from Jakob Nielsens 10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design. This helped in discovering many usability issues and provide a roadmap for next phases of the project.
Along with a number of smaller UX and UI issues, this exercise began to outline the larger problem with the app that the users may have been experiencing — that the flow of the platform was not optimised and required following a lot of proprietary and unnecessary steps to complete common tasks.
The platform asks users to undertake more steps than necessary to complete common tasks.
Left, the initial primary user flow with many unnecessary steps. Right, the proposed revised primary user flow.
SMOOTHING OUT THE EXPERIENCE
A quote that stood out the most when conducting user interviews for this product follows:
I understand it now but [the developers] had to show me how it worked...It takes a long time to make changes.
This was the main pain point that was addressed in the redesign. By categorising a Session as the parent that contained additional information, such as guests, locations, speakers and then allowing the user to edit that additional information from a single panel experience was smoothed out and made a lot more approachable and less cumbersome.
Organise the interface to reflect how an event is organised: A series of events in chronological order, divided by days.
LEFT: Old session editing panel, limited in-line additions can be made. RIGHT: Updated layout, tabbed navigation allows user to add more info as it comes up.
More details about the revised editor.
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE FOR HUMANS
The main lesson from this project was how a little bit of user research and design thinking can reduce the cost and timeline of a project, especially if a redesign has to happen as a result of not taking the user into account. Taking a step back, talking to the user and considering the context for which the project was being used produced a much more useable product in the end.
The final redesign mock-ups