AND Digital

Tools

Skills

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Overview

AND Digital is a tech consultancy with a mission to close the world's digital skills gap and a focus on being people-centric. They work on an integration model by forming high-performance teams with ANDis & their clients to build and rapidly deliver remarkable digital products and platforms.
AND Digital guides companies on their journey to Digital Greatness, through their digital consultancy practice.

www.and.digital

Client

Signavio

Duration

13 months

Signavio - a Business Process Management tool offers a powerful, integrated platform that helps you quickly realign your organization and bring changes to life at an accelerated rate. It supports the core of your business: the processes that you carry out every day.
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Process Intelligence (PI) at Signavio consists of multiple teams incharge of various modules including setting up KPIs for a user's business process, analysis and presentation of findings. A team was created which would be responsible for the functionality of setting up KPis called "Metrics" in PI and I was tasked as a consultant UX/UI designer incharge.

sap signavio process intelligence suite - metrics

Key Achievements

In-charge of running regular UX Research programs in collaboration with a dedicated Research team including creating research plans, interview guides, conducting user interviews, data analysis and synthesis of pain-points, goals and needs into a summary of findings.
Completion of multiple Discovery projects in the scope of Process Intelligence "Metrics" leading to planning and execution of new features resulting in a 2x increase in usage of Metrics
Collaboration with multiple designers across teams in terms of conducting presentations, workshops and regular discussions during research & ideation.

UX Background

A Product Discovery exercise was conducted by the team at AND Digital before the formation of the Metrics team at Signavio. There were two personas considered -
Metric Creator who was able to generate custom metrics though code and analyse the end user's business process through Investigations.
Metric Consumer who was the end user - typically a Process Owner or Manager who could possibly create Investigations but in most cases would study the reports created by the data analyst.
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Discovery results

Help me speed up my process by preventing double work on metrics
Help me understand what a metric does by previewing it before use
Help me access metric library more easily from when and where I need it
Lack of adoption with only 6% of users currently accessing the Metric library and Metric Collection

Constraints

Difficulty in access to clients or Metric consumers
Limited view of the entire suite - apart from Process Intelligence
Lack in technical knowledge of Metrics and SIGNAL code

UX Research & Analysis

As a new multi-disciplinary team for PI Metrics (Designer / Developers / Product Owner), it was important for us to understand the workflow of Metrics, its usefulness and the usability issues faced by our users. I was responsible for an in-depth 3-month user research program in collaboration with a dedicated UX research team at Signavio.

My work included creation of a research plan and selection of the type of persona that we wanted to focus on (Metric Creator / Metric Consumer & New / Experienced user). This was followed by preparing the interview discussion guide and conducting user research interviews with the people who represented our primary and secondary personas. We conducted synthesis sessions with the team and prepared research summaries of multiple phases in the research program.

The summary was particularly useful in aligning the team on priorities based on user input and planning the quarterly tasks in the form of epics. Our focus was on understanding the value of Metrics, reasons for low adoption, evaluate the userflow, improving UX functionality, providing a consistent user interface, introducing new features and providing better user feedback.
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UX Research - Interview notes / data synthesis / summary

Research Findings

Usability & Usefulness

One of the first issues that we received user feedback on Metrics was on usability. Initially two personas were considered - data analyst (Metric Creator) and a business user (Metric Consumer).
The aim of Metrics features in PI was to create a bridge between business and technology - to be useful and usable by both technical users (data analyst) who were adept at coding in the SIGNAL query language and business users who could not.
However, what we learned from research was that the SIGNAL queries / userflow were too complicated for business users and the available metrics were too simple / incomplete for data analysts.

Userflow

Metrics are ultimately useful for performing investigations in the platform where the user can look for issues and areas of improvement in their business process - Automation rate, Dropout rate, Average cycle time, etc. However, the userflow between Investigations and Metrics was not clear.
The user was not able to create a metric and easily use it in an investigation. Instead they would have to navigate between different sections without a visual cue.
This resulted in most data analysts disregarding the PI Metrics feature and create custom queries for KPIs in Investigations directly.
Hence Metric creators (data analysts) would not have an organised way to create and store these queries for future use resulting in business users not being able to create widgets with the existing queries. The customers were too reliant on consultants / data analysts.

Functionality & ease of use

Basic requirements such as being able to search, sort and filter on metrics were not yet available which made the feature difficult to use.
Data tables are central to the functionality of Metrics and users needed inline editing, multiple delete option and better organisation of data by providing categories and custom grouping of metrics in the collection
The main expectation of the user which would be the ability to use template metrics from the library to create widgets without having to make any modifications first.

existing metric collection:
search / sort / filter not available

Consistency in UI

The platform consisted of different sections such as Metrics, Insights, Investigations, etc where UI elements - headers, buttons, tables, data types and other interactions did not work consistently.
Lack of consistency in availability of information across Metrics in library and collection - data types such as Process type, Analysis Objective, etc
Difficulty in finding and accessing the Metric library - the option was hidden under drop-down option thereby creating Discoverability issues.

User Feedback

Tolerance to failure - Visual warning when a metric is about to be modified / deleted and all investigations that this would affect.
Clarity on metric details - Attributes / Connected widgets in Investigations - provide additional information where required
Metric Preview - let the user understand the logic of how a metric is created, provide a result in the library so that the user can make an informed selection

Signavio Metric Library - previous version

existing metric library:
no preview available

Ideation

As part of Ideation, I facilitated workshops - Brainwriting & Crazy-8 where the team was able to share their ideas on how we can solve the issues discovered during UX research.
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Developers were involved in early discussions and ideation sessions so that the approach would be user-centric and we could also understand the opportunities / constraints from a technical point of view.

This was followed by prioritising the ideas and generating groups of related issues into different epics. Some of the solution approaches are mentioned below.

brainwriting workshop:
prioritization of pain-points

Problem statement
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How might we improve the functionality and usability of Metrics so that the user (Creator) is able to access the required metric in a quick and efficient manner?

Solution approaches based on UX Research findings

UX Improvements in Metric Collection

Provide functionality to user so that they may efficiently find the required metric - search / sort / filter / preview options
Update the data table so that the user is able to delete multiple metrics through selection
Consistent data types across Metrics - add process type & analysis objective into Metric Collection
Provide consistent dialogs to user across Metrics - similar patterns required for edit and preview functions

User feedback

Clear feedback for the user regarding the status of a metric - Valid / Invalid and the reason why a metric might be invalid
Provide information to the user on how to fix a Metric that is invalid
All metrics when added from the library to the collection need to be valid - provide ways for the user to validate a metric with custom code when required in the library
Provide a clear visual warning for the user when they try to delete a metric - the list of widgets would be affected by this action

Connections between Metrics & Investigations

Users would like more data about a metric in Investigations - validity of a metric & how many widgets it has been used in
Categorize the valid & invalid Metrics in Investigations
Establish a two-way connection between Metrics & Investigations by providing a way to save custom code into Metrics from Widgets
Users should be able to reference a metric in widgets in Signal code
Provide a way to use a metric in an investigation without having to navigate out of Metrics

Solution approaches based on Business requirements

Visualisation of the changes in a Metric through time as a graph - Metric progression. This feature was required to close a gap with competitors and as part of user requirements.
Provide a comparison of the Metric result agaisnt the industry standard

Flowchart describing Metric Progression and all the way that a user can create and use a metric in an Investigation

userflow: metric progression

Prototypes

Functionality provided in Metric collection

Updated colours, navigation and buttons as per the change from Signavio's Glucose to SAP's Fiori design system
A list of widgets where each metric has been applied - the user is able to understand the intended use of the metric and how many it has affected
The user is able to search for a required metric and sort all columns through the header - currently sorted by Progression in the image below
It is possible to delete multiple metrics by selecting them and using the "Delete" button added in the header
The Progression graph is provided for each metric which shows how the result has changed through different data sets uploaded by the user

updated metric collection

Functionality provided in Metric Library

An overlay panel has been added to provide a preview in the metric library
The user can click on each metric in the library and view more details - most importantly the SIGNAL code through which gives them an idea of how the metric has been calculated
Search and sort functions have been added to the metric library data table

Updated Signavio Metric Library with preview screen

preview in metric library

In update of the design shown above, the metric result and an option to modify the code was also released. The design itself is not available for display - however the details are as follows.
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In order to improve upon the usefulness and usability of the Metric library, the user should be able to add a metric into the collection so that it is valid. This required a redesign of the input component where additional code would be entered based on the dataset uploaded by the user - called a "Variable". A multitude of options were considered where the user would be able to select from a list of default variable or add their own custom variable which would result in a valid metric.
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The final option chosen was an auto-complete which would satisfy both of the required options. This new variation of the input component was tested with users and implemented once we were sure that the userflow was clear and discoverable.

Outcome

Discovery projects successfully completed - Metric progression released on the platform and the project on "User-defined variables" was ready for Ideation phase
The user is able to view the SIGNAL code of a metric in the library and add default or custom variables thereby increasing the chances of having a "Valid" metric in the collection which can be used to create widgets.
Since June 2022, there was 65% increase in Metric collections and 45% increase in the number of Metrics

Feedback

Sindhu was a great team player, a great communicator of her work. She took care of the design topics end-to-end and delivering always in time.
She has been supportive for me as a new joiner on all aspects where I needed help. The UX Research practices and templates that I used from Sindhu helped me organise and facilitate other UX researches with ease.

senior product designer

...Right now, when Sindhu end her mission with our team, must say that she truly set a high standard which is now hard to keep up and she is remarkably written in our WoW and approach to the Product. I admire how she handover everything before the final day.

Sindhu is very supporting and competent and it would be honor for me to have a chance to work with her again. I love how she keeps the word, the commitment and how she is always prepared. To complement some initiatives and also to lead some initiatives.

Product owner

Having worked with Sindhu for most of the year gives me the following perspective: I genuinely like the professionalism and support attitude that Sindhu brings to her work and collaboration with all team members. She is self-sufficient and independent, allowing me to scale as a leader. I appreciate Sindhu’s stakeholder management; She always makes sure to bring transparency to her work Aligns well and often with the extended UX team on feedback, patterns, and design direction. She gives me visibility on the direction, design decision-making, and details of the project she is working on.

design PRINCIPAL

From a design perspective, Sindhu is a sound and skilled designer who works well with other designers, developers, PO’s , and stakeholders alike. The quality of her work is excellent, and the solutions she brings to the table are well-received and of value.

DESIGN PRINCIPAL

Cooperation with Sindhu has been great in all aspects. She prepared and handled user research sessions, organized design workshop for the team and prepared good quality prototypes with all the necessary information provided (Figma prototypes working, with attributes set correctly)

senior developer

Sindhu is a team player. She communicates her work frequently and often and seeks her stakeholders feedback.
Sindhu conducted multiple usability testing and participated in a research project to help uncover our users’ problems in her area of work.

senior product designer

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