User experience (UX)
UX Principles
Three user experience principles emerged from user research that guided the product’s design decisions:
Guidance
Show information only when it is important at that moment to not overwhelm users.
Simplicity
Show information only when it is important at that moment to not overwhelm users.
Transparency
Be open and honest with the information and the process users have to go through to complete their goals.
Focus
The design of the product in Alpha focused on product navigation, benefit filters, data mapping, and parent/child benefit relationships. We continued to iterate on that in Beta, but focused more on next steps, benefit content (adding in examples), search and user interface changes that increase users’ confidence in finding benefits and services relevant to them.
Process & Artefacts
After usability testing, insights from all the data collected are synthesized and shared to the whole product team. From there, the insights are compiled into cards in a Decision Dashboard Trello board as “Issues”. Designers along with a Researcher and Developer go through each issue and come up with a solution that takes insights and technical feasibility into account in what we called Ideation Sessions. The card then moves from “Issues” to “Solutions” for designers to then further investigate through user flows, wireframes and (if necessary) mockups.
Those decisions are tested in the next round to ensure the product is heading in the right direction and that the metrics collected in previous rounds improve.
The tracked changes in Alpha can be found here: Design Decision Log, and in Beta here: Beta Design Decision Log.