User Research
At ORIS and PriceSpider, we believe in product teams having regular interactions with customers. Product Designers and Managers were expected to be on at least three client calls a week. Most of our discovery was based on client interviews with follow up including mockup reviews or user testing with a prototype.
Card Sorting (PROWL)
We used card sorting exercises to figure out information architecture and also help form the dashboard. Users group information (data points) into groups that make sense to them and then name that group. Those groups can be used to make a better navigation bar or create a dashboard.
We started internally to serve as UX education process, and then did a remote card sort with 38 customers via Optimal Workshop.
Design Sprint (Seller Workflow)
In the last three months we’ve started using Design Sprints as an opportunity to identify and solve problems in PROWL. Following Jake Knapp’s guide, we set aside three hours a day for a week to do discovery, whiteboarding, prototyping and user testing. With a few developers and a product manager, the team accomplishes a quarter’s worth of work in one week.
We identified a part of PROWL that hasn't received a lot of attention - letting our users see a top level view of people selling their product. We exposed a lot of data around what the sellers are doing with the products, but users were asking for a way to easily evaluate seller relationships.
Prototype (Still Waiting on Beta)
The User Flow shows a list of all the sellers who have at least one of the user’s products on their site. We let users know related sellers, their violation percentage and discount. The rest of the flow is a deep dive into more granular data for each seller, like trending data over a week, month, quarter or year, contact management, and the ability to see if priority products are being sold by that seller.
We learned there were some navigation tweaks to be made and more information appearing on the first page to give users more insights. We are still in the process of making those changes to the design.