

It was totally unclear why certain people had different information displayed. It was through this process that I uncovered that integrating the four collaborator types into combined tables made the concepts even more confusing. But mostly, I’m asking lots of questions. The insight I gathered gave direction to new iterations and prototypes and identified other parts of the page that were confusing to users. I typically gather feedback by giving people common tasks in the interface. It’s not enough for it to look beautiful or work for my colleagues and me. Feedback from outsiders is essential to the process of creating an intuitive learnable app design. I tested with all sorts of people: users who were pretty new to Sookasa, longtime customers, and people in coffee shops (in other words, people who were totally unfamiliar with the product).Īs designer, I’m immersed in the product and the work I create. Paper prototypes allowed for faster iteration because they are faster to create, and I could respond and adapt to feedback on the fly.
Sookasa troubleshooting series#
I created a series of prototypes that incorporated the main features we’d need and captured the various types of users. I used paper, pen, and scissors to create paper prototypes. So armed with insight into how users interacted with the tab-and what they needed-it was time to actually generate designs based on our customers’ needs.

Beyond that, they needed to be able easily remove and add people, grant permissions to team members, block devices from accessing data, and more.

and not only did the current design make it difficult to discern who fit into each category, it was also too disorganized.Īfter all, a lot has to happen on the People tab: We could see that users relied on the People tab to check who was on their team, track account setup progress, as well as oversee external partners.

These distinctions were integral to the way users interact with the product. Through testing, however, we discovered we couldn’t have been more wrong. The old design had shied away from being explicit about these distinctions, in part because we feared the differences weren’t well understood by users. Through our research, we identified four main types of people that team admins manage: team members people who have been added to their team, but don’t have active accounts external partners, and external partners who have not accepted an invite to join Sookasa. Talking to customers is at the core of our design process: We have to understand their workflows in order to understand the problems that existed with the People tab.
Sookasa troubleshooting how to#
To learn how to approach the redesign, we sat down with customers who manage teams on Sookasa. We knew the People tab was poorly organized - it was unclear how people were grouped, and difficult to find who admins were looking for. And it all starts on the People tab, which is the primary place to manage team and external sharing permissions. Fundamentally, Sookasa is a different kind of security solution because it enables collaboration rather than restricts it. In many ways, this is the most important part of our app for administrators.
