Insights through Data · Jason George

01 · Discover

Dropped in the deep end

We had the luxury of a multi-day, hands-on discovery workshop. The creative director and I ran group sessions to understand the system, its users, the stakeholders and the business goals. Then we distilled what we heard into design principles and value propositions that kept the design accountable.

3

days of discovery

4

empathy & design sessions

14

user interviews

5

software deep dives

Sketchnotes from the discovery workshop with design principles and value propositions — Sketchnotes from the workshop. The design principles and value propositions came out of these sessions.

Two of the four persona cards — Four main users, built from the sessions and follow-up interviews and refined all project long.

“We modify the Drug Library to meet the practice.”

Nancy, 49 · Director of Nursing, one of the four personas

02 · Make sense

Mapping the whole system, screen by screen

1,648

screens mapped and organized

One of the most complex systems I had worked on. To get my head around it I visualized all of it, screen by screen, building a product inventory we could keep circling back to with stakeholders. It exposed:

Software entry points
Redundancies
Opportunities for visualizations

Wall of mapped screens forming the product inventory

03 · Design

From spreadsheets to visual answers

Spreadsheet-based reporting grids — Spreadsheet-based interfaces running multi-state plasma centers

The responsive dashboard with alerts and charts — A responsive, multi-user web app with visualizations that reveal relationships

Simple screens first

Once the data made sense I organized it into very simple screens that became starting points for user interviews and design sessions. They began in Illustrator, moved to Sketch and Figma, and finished as HTML and JavaScript.

Validation-session templates for data visualizations

Validation sessions

Working through the wires with targeted users and stakeholders, I built templates to flesh out the complex visualizations and to check mental models, data and navigation before anything was polished.

Wireflow of refined screens — Week by week the wires were refined and fed into a testable prototype.

04 · Test

A gorilla usability test at a power-user conference

A prototype on live data

After Sketch and Figma prototypes we built a web prototype fed with live data in HTML, JavaScript and Node. Navigation, visualizations and visual design felt right. Time to put it to the test.

The final UI: a performance overview with a yield efficiency chart

Four stills of power users testing the prototype

Getting data by any means necessary

In the last weeks, schedules were too tight to coordinate sessions, but most of the power users were at one conference. I booked a ticket, set up a table outside their rooms, and management asked everyone to stop by. I recorded every session.

Still from a recorded test session — Session clip (0:41): an example highlighting the need for GOALS in the UI.

Findings slide on personal quotes and keyword coding

Findings slide listing the most frequent keywords

Findings slide showing the Goals visualization

From the findings presentation: qualitative research, examples, and the design changes they drove.

What we heard

Users needed their goals visible in the UI. “Goals” was one of the highest-frequency keywords in the sessions.

What changed

We added a standard goal line to the charts, or at minimum a center-average line, so staff could see at a glance whether they were on target.

05 · Ship

Deployed and still in use

The DXT data-management product as deployed, connecting BECS software and devices

A wonderfully complex project that stretched all of my favorite muscles:

Discovery workshops Untangling a complex current system Organizing the project and data Sketches, wires and prototypes Observing and testing users Presenting to the client

Turning a maze of spreadsheets into a dashboard plasma centers still use

The short version