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Data-based workflow optimization
UI Designer: Microsoft Expression Blend
ROLE: Overall project lead, UI design, informal research, data-analysis
CHALLENGE: Original workspace was very complicated and didn't fit workflow patterns that designers were used to. Users spent too much time navigating the interface and not enough time making content.
SOLUTION: I created an off-the-books team of myself and a developer to add optimized telemetry to a custom build of the app. We distributed this to a small number of key users and I adapted visualization tools to surface tool use adjacency and ranked importance of different elements.
TOOLS: NodeXL
IMPACT: New workspace defaults added to tool; plans for re-imagined tool shelved when product subsumed into Visual Studio
Expression Blend was a very complex professional tool for designers to create user interfaces for WPF and Silverlight applications. The application presented a plethora of editors and designers coming from standard tools such as the Adobe suite had a hard time finding their way.
With a developer I created a custom build with highly targeted telemetry to determine which parts of the interface were used in
Ensuring that we collected the right data and only the right data was very tricky. Existing telemetry data was nearly impossible to parse due to its complexity and lack of context. Because of this we created a narrow set of properties and refined thresholds to filter the data set.
My first visualization of the data showed how much time a user spent in each part of the app and which tools were used after each other.
A subsequent visualization helped understand which parts of the app garnered the most user attention but lost the ability to understand which tools were used with each other.
I then made use of the NodeXL custom Excel plugin to create a graphical visualization of temporal adjacency and activity time for each major part of the Blend interface. This clearly showed to the team which tools and editors should be rearranged to decrease mouse motion and tab navigation.
I made interactive mockups directly in Blend, in a "sketch" style, to test various "Ribbon" style layouts
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