DOCUMENT FORMATTING: HEURISTIC EVALUATION
Customer feedback surveys indicated that formatting embedded tables was a frustrating and time consuming experience. Additionally, Workiva's Professional Services Managers (PSM) team was experiencing long delays in getting new clients onboarded due to the time consuming nature of converting their PDFs and formatting them into Workiva.
Role: UX Research Intern
Depth of involvement: Collaborated on test plan with Senior UX Researcher, took notes during interviews, wrote tasks based off of interview feedback, planned and facilitated heuristic evaluation with 3 expert evaluators, built study presentation, presented findings to product team (5 people).
CHALLENGES & LIMITATIONS
CHALLENGES
Because documents, particularly PDFs converted into Workiva files, were taking so long to format, it was causing a delay in getting new customer onboarded. The PSMs needed some improvements to the document formatting experience ASAP in order to expedite the onboarding process for new customers, which directly translated into company revenue.
LIMITATIONS
The biggest issue with document load times was related to performance speeds. This was something that we couldn't directly address as the UX Research team.
APPROACH
STAKEHOLDER INTERVIEW
We interviewed one of the PSMs who spent a majority of her time converting customer documents into Workiva. We chose to interview her because she had a track record of submitting new ticket ideas to R&D, and had been in her role for a number of years.
HEURISTIC EVALUATION PREP
Selected 3 evaluators representing different roles.
Prepared tasks and documents.
Conduct the training on how to do a heuristic evaluation.
Assigned deadlines.
GROUP RANKING AND ANALYSIS
I grouped the findings into an affinity diagram to capture common themes among the different evaluators. We then regrouped to assign group severity ratings to each issue. I then took the final group of issues and ratings and consolidated them into a report to share out with the team.
TOP FINDINGS
Hidden to protect confidentiality.
IMPACT
The findings from this study were used to inform the document team's product roadmap for the next quarter. The team was able to address one of the top five issues found, which had a direct impact on reducing the time it took PSMs to onboard new customer documents.
LESSONS LEARNED
Before taking on the project, we should have clarified how quickly the team would implement the findings from the research. While the PSM and Revenue teams were eager to get this research, it took longer than anticipated on the engineering side to implement the findings.
While the PSM we interviewed was very helpful, next time I would interview more than one just to verify that the issues were experienced by multiple PSMs.