The goal of this project was to create a new, user-friendly app that met the evolving needs of MediaHQ's research team. The aim was to provide researchers with quick and easy access to the necessary tools and information in their workflows, while incorporating essential functionality from the existing app.
MediaHQs research team were working on contacts in an old chunky backend app made 15 years ago. Since then the research workflows had evolved and the backend app didnt serve their needs anymore. The task was to create a new app that gave them the ability to do their work as quickly and as easily as possible, whilst using the functionality we had in our current app.
Primary Research
To begin we did some primary research on our users. We had a sit down conversation with the researchers and they voiced the current issues and frustrations with their current app.
From this we took their problems and created needs for the design. Then we started to put them into categories so we could prioritise which aspect of the app needed to be built first.
It was also very apparent and this stage that there were 2 research personas we were creating for, our research managers and then the researchers themselves so we created some empathy maps so we could begin to think in their shoes.
After this we decided that this project would have to be split into 3 epics to meet all the needs for the researchers: Metrics & allocation, ingest and research.
User journeys
Once we had all the information we needed and a plan for the new app. We then did some first hand interviews with each researcher on their current workflows and documented their user journeys.
Once we had this we sat down as a team and created new user journeys. We streamlined their workflows in a way that made it the fastest and easiest way for them to do their work with our current functionality.
Now we knew exactly what needed to be done we started to do some ideation we started with some collaboration as a product team in miro. Then we went away and did some paper prototyping. Once we had a rough idea of what we wanted i did up some wireframes.
Prototyping
Now that we had agreed on our approach as a team I started doing some design research and began to create figma prototypes of our design. Once we had our designs the next step was to test our designs on the researchers.I created a usability test and tested the designs on them. After a few tweaks we were confident the design was ready for development.
