Week 1: Background Research

This week has been all about getting up to speed and homing in on exactly what I'll be doing for this project.  My field supervisor, Robin Silberling, provided me a tailored overview late last week of what the UE team would like to me explore over the next 15 weeks.  I'll be working on a redesign of a very sticky and inconsistent piece of the Web Experience Management (WEM) interface called the "picker." Pickers are one of the defined frameworks used in the WEM product to allow users to move items around and make selections.

Example of a multi-select picker in version 8.1

I reviewed the results of summative testing done on the WEM product and problems with the picker interface were identified as two of the top 10 items needing to be addressed in the next version.  Only 40% of customers and 44% of non-customers were able to add a channel to a content item on the first try.  The team aims for an 80% success rate without help to give a task a passing score.  Some of the issues include

• The single picker and multi-picker interfaces are different
• Confusion about the red "x" icon used for the remove action, concern this meant there was an error
• Users expected to be able to select channels from the tree
• Users often didn't notice that an item had been added to the "Your Selections" area
• Confusion about the need to click the "Add Selection" button to confirm choices

I'm excited to have the chance to come up with some design improvements for these pain points.  I don't know yet if my proposal will actually be tested with users but that would be really great to see how they scored.  I have several suggestions from users and the UE team to get me started and I have started a list of my own.  I think the biggest challenge will be coming up with a unified design to satisfy the many instances in the interface where pickers are used.  My first task next week will be to sit down with a development version of WEM and use it myself to get a feel for using this product.