How a UX Design Review can Boost Online Products.

‘Our web-based product has been developed over 10 years,’ explains Gordon Buxton, Director at Oxinet. ‘As new features have been added to meet customer demand, the overall package has become somewhat inconsistent. It works well once you are familiar with it, but one of the barriers to its adoption is that it’s not as intuitive to new users as we’d like it to be. So rather than continuing to integrate new features, we wanted to rebuild the entire user interface.’

PEMS was originally built using ASP.NET WebForms and recently switched to ASP.NET MVC. The combination of these two frameworks has led to an inconsistent visual design. New features have been developed over time to meet customer demands, with limited scope to fully integrate these features into the core architecture of the platform. Furthermore, some new functionality has been commissioned by specific customers which does not always meet the needs of the entire customer base.

To help solve these issues, Oxinet approached OCC’s in-house UX design team. ‘I had previously worked with OCC, so I contacted them to see if they could help,’ says Buxton. ‘Their design team forms part of a larger software company, so they have a lot of experience working closely with developers. They speak our language and could also check the technical feasibility of what we were trying to achieve.’

OCC’s approach to every project is to undertake an in-depth analysis of the problem. The UX team held lengthy discussions with Oxinet to delve into the rationale behind design and development decisions. To help Oxinet rebuild the PEMS interface in the short term, but also retain consistency in the long term, OCC decided to both conduct a detailed UX design review and to produce a UI style guide.

Understanding the Customer

End-user requirements should be the central focus during the research process. It can be difficult to uncover expectations and assumptions and to juggle the varying requirements of multiple users.

To tackle this, OCC conducted a series of detailed interviews and user testing sessions with Oxinet’s customers to gain first-hand insight into the user journey and experience. This also gave users the opportunity to share any concerns relating to navigation, accessibility, and usability issues, which OCC could then aim to solve.

‘By having an independent third party define the design guidelines, all our customers could provide their input, but OCC could develop the final solution to suit everyone,’ says Buxton. ‘OCC’s software development and design expertise also helped to add credibility and authority to the reasoning behind decision making.’

UX Design Review

From the user interviews, OCC found that the lack of consistency of UI elements was reducing the usability of PEMS and that new users had to memorise workflows. The comprehensive UX review therefore focused on both UI and user journeys. In terms of a review approach, OCC adopted the usability heuristic evaluation method and adhered to additional design principles throughout.