Geophysics Product Hub
A product hub for geophysicists, data analysts, enegy performance analysts and other highly technical professionals that introduces them to new offerings from a trusted information source in their industry.
I was the lead designer on this product, from strategy to design to development handoff
My Role
Discovery
Audit
Competitive Analysis
UX/UI Design
Dev Handoff
Company
(Client Confidential)
Timeline
6 Weeks
Tools Used
Figma
The Client
The client was an established vendor in the geological survey industry, with decades of experience and subject matter expertise. They had a set of core products that their loyal clients knew very well and trusted. As technology in their field changes and new innovations were being made in energy acquisition and sustainabillity, the client was looking for a way to introduce their newer products to existing clients, as well as bring in new customers.
Discovery for a Highly Technical Industry
Our client was a data provider in the oil and gas industry. Their users and employees included extremely technically-minded and knowledgeable geologists, data analysts, physicists and developers. Understanding their workflows, pain points and mental schemas took more than the usual level of research we typically conducted for our work.
I spent a lot of time learning about the industry, the way in which data models were constructed, and why they needed the information. It was extremely challenging but highly rewarding to understand this user set and be able to translate their process into user journeys that they would be able to see themselves in.
Sketching for Divergent Ideas
One of my favourite methods to create divergent ideas and harness creativity is freehand sketching on paper. To help the client on this project break the mold of their imagination, I spent some time sketching different variations of a product hub that they might consider. It also helps to quickly visualize ideas and give them a sense of what they don't want, just from seeing it, without investing too many resources in low-fidelity wireframes.
Open Card Sort to Create Team Cohesion
Probably the most interesting part of this project for me was the open card sort with the client team. An important challenge for them was coming to a consensus on how to organize the various data libraries and atlases. There were competing interests on the team who wanted their own products to be centred in different ways.
The card sort exercise, which was moderated by myself and our design team, was a chance for them to discuss and rationalize their individual choices. We then turned the results of our discussion over to Playbook UX to give us the results in the form of a graphs that illustrated the rate of similarity in the teams choices. Through their team discussion in the workshop and the statistical results of the card sort, the client team was able to align on a set of categories to catalog their products.
Creating The Elements of a High Fidelity Design
Once we knew how we were organizing the products from our card sort and what the general UI would look like from our sketches, we went through the usual rounds of low-fidelity wireframing, ui exploration and high-fidelity prototypes.
We created a responsive design that would work on mobile and tablet as well and added some functionality for SSO login that the company wanted to expand on in later versions.
The final step was development. Ordinarily, I work with our in-house team on development, but this time, the client had their own preferred developer. Handoff is generally the same in any case.
