Recommendations
Project 2: Matchmaking component for Exhibitors
As recommendations demonstrate a great response to the GA, the benefits and feedback from users such as Exhibitors, Visitors, and participants enable the team to continue on the improvement of the experience and features to enable more accurate recommendations. This project focuses on creating the Matchmaking component enabling Exhibitors to set themselves on the Exhibitor portal, so that they can be recommended to visitors before, during, and after the show.
User: Exhibitor
Requirement 1: Enable creation of attributes
Requirement 2: Enable multiple types of questions (Dropdown / Multiple choice / Multilevel)
Requirement 3: Enable optional / skip questions
Requirement 4: Enable confirmation
Requirement 5: Enable delete / close
Requirement 6: Consistency across the Exhibitor Portal
The process
Discovery
Discussions with the PO and BA team were initiated in order to kick the discovery phase and align the goal of this project.
To break this down this project the team began a series of workshops to review all the existing component capabilities and drawbacks. these activities help us to identify lots of areas for improvement both on performance and the user experience. This was a great activity as it brought us all to the same level of understanding and participation in our areas of expertise.
Part of my research was to understand the original component, look at the limitations as well as what could be reused for this project. How are the interactions and the UI in which this component was going to be implemented and ensure the other teams were aware of this development.
Learnings
- The Matchmaking component (MBO) will be used on an Exhibitor's Portal which belongs to another team stream.
- The changes applied to the (MBO) would also impact in other areas, where it is used such as the 'Visitors'
- The portal has its own UI and interactions and needed to ensure they remain consistent across
- We introduced a new 'Multilevel' control when a question is displayed, a user is given a list of options then one is to be selected and it continues displaying more options until it reaches the leaf (the final option).
Challenges
- Modifying an out of the box (MBO) component, as there are so many restrictions
- Lack of consistency across teams
- Change of team members during the projects
- Time difference between teams
- Team dependencies
- Testing tools not being available when needed
- Marketing and Product are decupled therefore the MM service's benefit for some countries was unknown
Opportunities
- Working closely with a BA and have the support of a PO
- Ability to follow the whole process yourself
- Team flexibility and positive mindset
Usability Requirements
In order to identify the User experience, I did a heuristic evaluation, and listed areas for improvement and shared with the team.
Usability Stories
This was a higher level and later on used on the Sprints planning with a lot more detail and prioritization
Prototype
In order to ensure we were designing the correct solution, a prototype was shared among the team, in this case, no user was involved as we did not modify the journey instead we were improving the component experience and the answers could be gathered with company users.
Feedback loop
This is one of the most enjoyable phases of the UX design process as you can confirm your thoughts and solutions are on the right track or get other participants' ideas to improve the initial solution, either way, it is positive.
- This round helped us all realized that having a back functionality would affect the logic of the component which was not taken into consideration by the developers. this was a great opportunity to get those details in place.
- A clarification of the multilevel component's functionality, as we all had received a different requirement.
- A justification on what and why we had to follow certain UI patterns who were the owners.
Overall we had 3 rounds and they were really constructive sessions.
Development
Once the PO was happy with the finals they were approved and moved to the next stage of pixel-perfect for hand over to the developers.
Visual handoff checklist
Every team has set its own process, some are well established and it all depends on the maturity of the teams, resources, and tools available. I tend to provide the wireframes, UX specification, boards with all the dimensions specified.
