UX Research w/Prototype, Roadmap Updates

High Fidelity Prototype

A viewing link to our figma prototype can be found here:
https://www.figma.com/file/6B3vmcOL4AZuZSkNPcb0KV/prototype?node-id=15%3A4

Evaluation Protocol

To evaluate our prototype, we followed up with two interviewees from our user persona research in CSC454 A3. The first interviewee was Lucas Schuermann, who is the VP of Engineering at a Fintech company with fewer than 10 employees. Our second interviewee was Olivia Li, a tech lead at a San Francisco startup with around 70 employees. We also interviewed our instructor Julian Nadeau.

We plan to continue conducting UX research in the future and hope to find additional users to give feedback on our prototype and MVP. In particular, we want to interview:

• Tech employees of various levels. Differing levels of authority within an organization translate to different focuses on our product. We expect those in a position of leadership (like Lucas) would emphasize our security features more, while those in more collaborative roles (like Olivia) would emphasize usability.
• Employees in a variety of roles. All of our current interviewees come from a background of software engineering, so we have very one-sided perspectives so far. Supplementary feedback from those who work in product or research would offer fresh viewpoints on our product.
• One time users, meaning people who might be shared a file through our service but not use it as a part of their work. This is relevant for any use case that involves viewing a specific file.

During each interview, we asked the same set of jobs for them to complete sequentially:

1. Upload a file.
2. Let Windsor view the file you just uploaded.
3. View the file you just uploaded.
4. View the history of the file to see if Windsor has seen it.
5. View a file you received from someone else.
6. View who is in your organization and invite someone.

We took notes, asked participants for feedback while they completed each job, and did our best not to bias them with any leading questions.

Results

We consolidated our feedback from the interviews into three categories–strong points, pain points, and nice-to-haves. We were very pleased to find that overall, all our participants were able to smoothly go through each job without any issue. The only mistake participants made were figuring out how to add new users to their organizations. All participants enjoyed the consistent color schemes and digestible layouts that were consistent with commonly used file managers. The issues brought up were largely user dependent, for instance, Julian brought up that he would enjoy having file size also be shown on tables detailing several files. All three participants, however, did mention that they would like the security features - file history button, activity table etc. - to be more obvious, as it is one of the main features of our service. Moving forward, we will definitely need to find ways to incorporate this feedback into our current designs meaningfully. Additional feedback can be found below and raw notes for the interviews can be found in the appendix.

Strong points

• Design is consistent with itself and similar services (ie. Dropbox)
• Clear color scheme
• Straightforward tasks, does not feel cumbersome or slow to use

Pain points

• ‘Check history’ button should be more obvious since security is a main feature of our product
  • The log could be a separate tab, with the file itself being the primary tab
• Again, since security and the ability to track file accesses is a primary selling point, we may consider adding more details to each log
• The responsibilities and differences between the different roles are not very apparent. It is quite necessary that the information popup clearly explains the differences.
• Organization membership should be sync automatically with LDAP
  • We’ll omit this for the MVP, but are aware that this is an important feature for production.

Nice-to-haves

• File rows could be more informative (include creation time, file size, etc.)
• The horizontal margins on the right section of the page are inconsistent.
• Sometimes it is unclear what elements are clickable, especially if they are just black text.
• The link in the email looks like a footer instead of a button.
• Dark mode would help differentiate us between existing file storage systems and may increase our brand appeal.

Roadmap

The only change seen to our roadmap were short term development changes. We discovered that due to Ethereum’s high gas prices and slower transaction times, it would not be wise to use it as a means to deploy smart contracts. Instead, we opted for Binance, which has drastically lower gas prices and faster transaction times. (Binance, 2022) We also found that many of our tech stack decisions centered around Amazon services would be too time consuming to develop when compared to easier platforms which our team is more familiar with. We will be making updates to our tech stack and documenting any key changes on LearnSoftware in the coming days. Outside of this, all early logistics and UI/UX related tasks have been largely completed and our team is making strong headway into development as planned.

References

Gas (GAS) Coin Price, Chart & News. (n.d.). Binance. Retrieved February 28, 2022, from https://www.binance.com/en/price/antcoin

Appendix

Appendix A: Lucas Interview Notes

General

• Likes the color scheme
• Very consistent
• Straightforward and clear

Upload a file [no mistakes]

• Very clear
• Maybe have the add file thing beside

Let Windsor view the file [no mistakes]

• Very obvious
• Maybe have a quicker way to access

View the file [no mistakes]

• Straightforward
• More details for how external people view the file

See the history of the file [no mistakes]

• Add more details
• Make the check history button more obvious
• Maybe for updates, see what they updated
• For views, see what they viewed specifically

View a file you received from someone else [no mistakes]

• Again, more details

View who is in your organization and invite someone

• Add user profile pic
• A more clear ‘admin’ role

Appendix B: Julian Interview Notes

General

• Not aligned on right side with “Create +” on left
• Sidebar
  • Recent should go to recent section rather than having a section on the page
  • Reformat the listing on the sidebar
• Can’t tell the role the current user is
  - UI/UX interview takeaways
  • Ask permission to record
  • Lead with questions
  • Too leading aka don’t bias the interviewee
    • Instead, if the user does something that isn’t what you expected, ask them “what made you lead to that”
  • Don’t give answers
  • Be mindful of delivery (customer service voice)
  • We want raw feedback

Upload a file [no mistakes]

• Suggestion: make it auto upload rather than clicking “Upload”
• Suggestion: change the table alignment for less negative space between the last two columns
• Suggestion: use the metadata for file created timestamp
• No file size column

Let Windsor view the file [no mistakes]

• Suggestion: hover over the collaborators section for more info
  • Need it to be more accessible for blind people
  • Rather than just icons, hover over the icons for names of people
• Pretty straightforward

View the file [no mistakes]

• Very easy
• Noticed that the file is uploaded to root directory and not to folders
• Suggestion: use a home page or dashboard rather than quick access

See the history of the file [no mistakes]

• Make the check history button more obvious so it’s clear it’s a link
• Make it a tab page
  • So one page for file
  • One page for access history
• Suggestion: admins care about history but a user may not, so separate this view

View a file you received from someone else [no mistakes]

• Suggestion: Look into sharepoint link to share protected files and messages
• Looks too much like a footer and less like a button

View who is in your organization and invite someone [mistakes were made]

• LDAP should sync login
  - Clicked the settings button instead
• Should make the top right buttons more obvious
  • The people button looks like the google drive share button
    • Suggestion: add a ‘+’ on the icon to make it clear it’s for sharing

Appendix C: Olivia Interview Notes

Upload a file [no mistakes]

• Unsure of how ‘standard’ the current file upload flow is
• Perhaps there should be a preview of the file you chose to make sure you uploaded the right one

Let Windsor view the file

• Initially tried to click the file row (specifically, under the collaborators column) instead of the vertical dots menu
  • We may want to allow more functionality from the file’s page itself, instead of just from the list
• Unclear about what other roles may be available

View the file [no mistakes]

• Maybe allow the file to take up more space, or have a fullscreen mode. It may be hard to see details on a crowded file since the file itself only takes up a fraction of the page.

See the history of the file [no mistakes]

• The table is kind of ugly and uninformative. Maybe each row should be interactive and clicking on one reveals more functionality/details?
• The ‘check history’ and ‘export buttons are not clearly interactive
• Timestamp is not human-readable

View a file you received from someone else [no mistakes]

• The email should be slightly more informative
• Questions about how the ‘Shared with me’ section should be organized

View who is in your organization and invite someone [no mistakes]

• Again, unsure what each role means
• Again, table is ugly and can likely be more informative and interactive