About the Project
Over the course of a four month internship, I was able to engage in an in-depth user research project involving a large policy creation, editing, and validation tool that will be launched by vArmour later this year. This is a revolutionary feature involving complex data center and cloud environments, hence the large need for user engagement and feedback. The main issues we addressed were: overall workflow, usability of the UI, and effectiveness of the presentation and functionality. The goal was to identify both values and issues in these areas and use the results to improve the designs in future iterations before full development and release.
Prototyping
I created a high-fidelity prototype with Framer to test new features with users. The prototype is protected due to an NDA, but I would be more than willing to share it with anyone who might be interested.
User Testing
After creating task flows and identifying which areas of the user workflow to focus on, we set specific research goals that guided our carefully worded test script. We tested 5 users, slightly updating and improving the prototype and test script in between sessions. Each user session lasted about 90 minutes and was recorded in audio and video for later use. Many stakeholders became interested in re-watching these user tests, as they were valuable not only to the UX team, but the sales and executive teams as well. During these tests, I was the facilitator and my colleague Jabi was the note taker. Together we observed users interact with this tool and gained valuable data about these users' needs and expectations.
After analyzing and synthesizing our data, some of the many insights we uncovered include:
- Overall workflow is intuitive
- Terminology is unclear
- Edit is a critical action within the policy creation process
- Having flexibility to accommodate different scenarios is necessary
A few suggestions we made are to re-word some of the confusing descriptors and include better textual and visual descriptions. We also added more tool-tips throughout the product as a non-distracting and non-invasive way to provide more information for users. In the future, tutorials might be added to help teach and guide users when they first attempt to use various features of complex tool.
With more time and resources, I would have loved to implement some of these enhancements in the prototype and hold a few more user tests. Instead, the designs will be revised based on these insights and suggested enhancements and the product will go live.