Testimonial
LexisNexis, Miamisburg Headquarters, Dayton, Ohio
“Sanket did an excellent job as a Human-Computer-Interaction intern joining our research team for the summer of 2016. He combined an intense intellectual curiosity with an effective foundation of skills and a professional approach to his work. Sanket collaborated well with the team and provided unique contributions and a nice set of designs to explore and consider. He should make a fine addition to any team interested in boosting the productivity and satisfaction of users.”
Things I learnt working in a big organisation
LexisNexis has a lot of product offerings and 'LexisNexis Advance' being their flagship product that generates maximum profit for the company. LexisNexis Advance (LN Adv) is a web application that law firms can buy access to on a subscription basis or pay per click basis. LN Adv is a repository of all the cases, their verdicts and laws in the US history. Lawyers use this tool to research for any case they want to present in the court. Law schools use this tool as well, which acts as their textbook for anything related to Law in the US.
Working in such a large organisation exposed me to understanding the workings of the hundreds of departments and people that contribute to the LN Adv product lineup each day.
Here are a few things I learnt working for 3 months at the Dayton Headquarters of the company, in Ohio:
Importance of understanding the culture:
One of the things on the top of my to-know list was understanding the company culture, how each department works, and how much autonomy each department has. As a UX intern, I collaborated with the developers, data analysts, and the user reps. Knowing who leads which department and how much do they swing the the decisions made for the product gave me a better sense of adapting my designs to reflect what people from these departments had to say.
Collaboration:
To ensure smooth transition of my design concepts to the people working on it next was critical to success of the project. This is where collaboration and building good rapport with the people around me helped. I also noticed that bouncing off ideas with the prototyper, or the programmer and not just the researchers in my lab helped me get to the right design faster.
Multitasking:
In the 3 month period, I worked on 4 main projects that had vastly different character and that involved collaborating with a spectrum of different people. I always had one main project that went on for weeks and a side project, so successful multitasking was key to giving appropriate time to each project. Planning ahead and taking out some time each morning helped me focus on multiple projects and facilitated me to stay on top of the deadlines.
Overview
Design core: 'Giving users more context'
The current version of the LN Adv web app had an update long overdue. LN Adv differentiated itself from the competition by introducing a way of visualising the search term hits in the documents it returned as the search result. The way this was achieved was by using strip maps to correlate with the hits registered in the document. Even with the introduction of the new way of visualising the result, the product needed much work.
The interface was text heavy and it was difficult to see multiple documents at a time, thus making comparing documents difficult. Also users had to scroll endlessly to get to the documents that might interest them. As a result, the cognitive load on the users was something that had to be reduced.
Current Version
Current version
The old version, as shown above, is text heavy and each document is in the expanded format by default. The overview of each document is displayed, thereby increasing the page length and making the user scroll a lot to get to the relevent document.
Proposed Version
Proposed version
In the new proposed version, I enhanced the interaction with the list of documents by the following methods:
- Added a layer of interaction by enabling the hover feature
- Quick information glancing became possible with the hovering
- Also, user's didn't lose context as the other documents are still visible in the background
- More results can now be seen since the default view is condensed.
- Users can selectively expand the overview section to compare multiple documents easily.
Design Core: 'Not just colorful pretty graphs'
Once the interaction overhaul was done, the next project in line was even more challenging and intresting from the interaction design stand point. Not only did I have to think of a clean intuitive way of showing dozens of documents returned by the search, but the visualization also had to interaction and modification worthy for the users to play around and modify their search using the visualization.
Step 1: Choosing the right data
LexisNexis has thousands of law firms across the country that use the LN Adv product daily,and search thousands of documents. Every document that is visible to the user, has a bunch of attributes attached to it in the form of metadata. Understanding what each metadata point means for the document and then mapping it to the usefulness of that metadata to make a visualization was the key to a coming up with a successful visualization.
Step 2: Research on Visualization Techniques
Once we knew what data points would make a meaningful visualization for the end users, the next obvious step was to research the different types of visualization. Reading a lot of articles and books followed by blogs and other open data conference articles helped me get a complete understanding of various types and what they should be used for. Some of the types explored were tree diagrams, bubble charts, sankey diagrams, network diagrams,etc. Each technique had its own challenges.
Image blurred for non disclosure of sensetive data.
Step 3: Prototyping Selected Visualization
Once the technique and the data to be used was finalised, the big challenge was to prototype the experience and validate it with the user representatives. To get the actual data from the available csv files I used excel to manipulate raw data. Once the data was pre-processed and adjusted, Gephi was used to develop the live visuaization for that data. Advantages of using Gephi were the ease of data manipulation and open environment to plug in our own programs to control the output.
Step 4: Making Complex Viz User Friendly
Once the visualizations were live and ready, the team discovered that they were complex and too detailed for the users to make any sense of them. So there was another challenging task for me as an Interaction Designer to make those complex visualizations simple and friendly for user interactions. One way to achieve this was to filter out less important data and arrive at a comfortable complexity level where the cognitive load on the user was not entirely absent but was absolute minimum.
Image is blurred for non disclosure of sensitive data
Design Core: 'Avoiding design fixation'
Apart from the primary visualization technique, the objective of this project was to get out of the design direction the team had been taking and to come up with alternate visualization concepts that may or not be as successful but would help in giving the user a more high level view of the results set from the search done by the user.
The first activity I did was to perform an elaborate exemplar study and find out examples of successful and not so successful data visualization projects in various fields. Once the exemplars were in place for motivation and design inspiration, the next step was to do infinite whiteboarding with Richard Miller (my manager & research lead) and Todd Frascone (prototyper) to bounce off ideas and get feedback.
Finally, I sketched up the finished and polished mockup of the visualization and was presented to Gaurav Mehra (Head of product strategy) for further explorations and iterations that may be needed before it goes in the beta for public testing.
Image is blurred for non disclosure of sensitive data
Testing with User Reps
Get a chance to test our early and ambitions visualization project with the user representatives really helped us and assured us that the direction we were headed was right. Since visualization project project is not disclosed to the public, we were constrained by testing it in house.
Testing with Actual Users
The enhanced version of the LN Adv web app was tested with real users and it provided real insights into the working of vrious user groups. From the feedback I got for those designs, it became clear that the new designs would benefit one group of users more than the other, and going back to the whiteboard and tweeking the proposed solution helped me make my designs more open to different workflows of different user groups.
Reflections from my Internship
1. Data Driven Design
Bill Buxton has said his book 'Design Of Everyday Things'- "First get the right design, then get the design right" and the most important thing I took away from my experience at LexisNexis is that "only research driven real data can help you get to the right design." It was crucial for me to get in the weeds of the metadata and then coming up with a visualization solution in order for the solution to be of any value and use to the users. Often designers are less willing to be data analysts for the initial phase of the design process, but not shying away from the task of playing with muddy data helped me deliver a solution that users will actually want to use.
2. Asking a lot of questions
I know this is a cliche thing to say, but what I actually mean by asking a lot of questions is that it not only helped me in design, but also helped in understanding the culture of the company, expectations of the people I worked with, understanding the rationale of the designs already in use etc. All this gave me a broad sense of my environment and also helped me understand how best to present my solutions to the head of Product Strategy and get other influential people on board with my solution.
3. Continuously looking for feedback
Since my manager, Richard Miller, had been working for decades on the research for these visualizations, I really found value in having frequent conversations with him and bouncing off ideas and concepts off him. Also talking about my work and concepts with the prototyper helped me get his take on the designs. This not only helped me design better but also made me realize my mistakes early.
4. Being elaborate in meetings
By being a good listener and always having something to contribute in the meetings helped me contribute in a meaningful way and also helped others appreciate my inputs as a resource. Even if the meetings were on other design projects I wasn't directly involved in, I made sure to understand the project and also spoke up when needed to help the team brainstorm better. The only tangible outcome of being elaborate in meetings was that I got an invitation to all further meetings.
5. From ideas to actual product feature
Having worked on multiple projects, right from data gathering to delivering detailed high fidelity mockups, I got a chance to be a part of all the phases in the project life cycle. To ensure that the design solutions I presented were actually implemented in the real product, I collaborated with the Graphic Design Lead to make sure my mockups were following the design guidelines of the company to the finest detail. Going out of my way to polish my designs helped in getting the head of Product Strategy onboard with ease.
6.Listening to users, carefully
All the concepts and mockups I designed went for user testing, where the testing was performed remotely with the users of small and huge law firms in the presence of a User Testing Expert. I got to learn a lot observing her test the concepts with professional and proficient manner. Yet, to ensure I got the feedback I wanted, helped to have a test script of my ready and handing it the expert. Also taking good notes helped me go back to the whto iterate and analyse.