Business hypothesis
ALS is the leading full-service provider of analytical geochemistry services to the global mining industry. We are creating a mobile app in order to show accurate core sample results in a timely fashion to allow clients to make decisions faster.
Team
Senior Geochemist: Product owner
IT team: development, launch & maintenance
Myself: UX, UI
IT team: development, launch & maintenance
Myself: UX, UI
Roadmap
1. Research: Interviewing people that will use the product and researching the business domain that will be impacted.
2. Create personas based on behavioral patterns and goals to drive UX and development decisions.
3. Writing scenarios that imagine how the real-life situations that our persona is likely to be in will be enhanced by our app and demonstrate the impact our app will have on their lives.
4. Creating a design framework that clarifies how the scenarios flow together to support a great end-to-end user experience, and a viable product.
1. Research:
8 global business development staff interviewed (Australia, Peru, Chile, Brazil, Canada, USA, Spain).
5 client reps interviewed: VPs, Senior Managers, Geologists, Geoscientists and Geochemists.
All 12 interviews were over the phone and 1 in-person. As an ice-breaker, interviewees were asked to engage in a 'brain dump' exercise that allowed them to list all ideas they might have for an app. The other 80% of the interview questions were structured around day-to-day challenges and behaviors.
2. Personas:
We disseminated the interview scripts and created patterns and clusters around end goals, experience goals, behaviors, attitudes, mental models, barriers, demographics, and skill levels. This exercise helped us avoid self-referential design, come up with a better and more targeted solution, build empathy for the people that use our products and services, and provide a design target. The personas were created based on clusters we detected in mental models around the field of exploration.
3. Scenario:
The proposed scenario details the goals, problems and environment of the primary persona. This helped us keep sight of the real world context and informed usage behaviors, patterns, and goals. It makes it easier to avoid disembodied feature lists that are hard to prioritize, maintain the continuity of the experience and help us see the big picture and not spend too much time on tiny details.
4. Design Framework:
Solutions based on personas & scenario:
- Order Tracking
- Progress alerts (w/ Preset alert categories)
- Workorder history
- Ability to contact closest lab
- Overlimit graphs
- Mine Site Alerts (Live data on waste water/slurry)
- Progress alerts (w/ Preset alert categories)
- Workorder history
- Ability to contact closest lab
- Overlimit graphs
- Mine Site Alerts (Live data on waste water/slurry)
User Flow + Prototype
Refined Mockups (Illustrator & Adobe Xd):
