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1. The "How do I get started?" Problem
Users report not knowing how to get started from the home screen.
Client feedback suggests that users simply don't know where to begin. They see five options, but they don't think it's immediately obvious what any of the options means or why they should start with one option over another:
The initial start screen on Lambda Analytika's home screen.
Steps have been taken to improve the situation through the addition of pdf and video guides, however these options have their own usability issues. The PDF is very long (over 200 pages!) and the video is 11 minutes long without a searchable transcript, so at best these options require significant user investment in finding the relevant information rather than providing the right information at the right time for each user.
At first glance, this appears to be an onboarding problem - providing a better onboarding experience could certainly make starting off in the right direction more obvious to people. But I tend to think onboarding is a solution to a symptom, not the root cause itself. Google Now and Siri are excellent examples of proactive, in-context help.
Onboarding: the practice of quickly equipping novice users with the minimum amount of knowledge required for them to get started on their own. See UserOnBoard's Onboarding Teardowns for much more on this.
I was inspired by some of the problems that Google Now solves, and decided to see if that might spark any ideas. Keeping in mind the '80/20 rule' really just means to focus on the problems that cause a disproportionate amount of issues for people, I wondered if there were a handful of most common types of analysis that people generally want to use, and therefore whether we can simply proactively generate them and suggest them to the user as examples of finished products to quickly demonstrate value.
A materialized start page.
A second idea came to me about having a more interactive way of learning how to create an Ad Hoc Table, which is a typical scenario. Having clearly visible steps, an indication of progress, time remaining, and questions prompting feedback and more tailored help experience - with novices receiving more verbose help, and experts receiving a much leaner help package, for example.
An interactive learning flow.
2. The "How do I see the most useful reports for me?" Problem
Client feedback indicates that another usability hurdle exists at the point when a user, such as a Line Manager, wants to see a certain kind of report. The main idea with this mockup is to investigate whether there are some kinds of reports or views that get created/viewed disproportionately more than others. If so, maybe we can proactively suggest those reports with the necessary values prefilled? Or alternatively go even further and provide the highlight findings using actionable cards?
Here, for example, the user is getting notified that the list of users he or she is managing is performing better than the previous cohort.
Proactive suggestions of meaningful and helpful reports.
If the user wants to create or view their own report, the following storyboard shows one idea, relying on search. Visually you’ll notice these screens are a little different, with the current iconography and a floating action button. From here, the user clicks Search.
1 - "I want to find a report, or create it if I don't have it yet."
2 - Search can be such a powerful piece of UI - giving it sufficient space to showcase that.
3 - Chunk words into discrete tags from phrases as you type, and suggest creating a report if there are 0 search results.
