Product Design ✦ User Experience ✦ User Interface
Product Design ✦ UX ✦ UI
An extensive infrastructure company in Israel that provides water to all country residents and is responsible for examining inquiries from businesses and citizens who wish to use the infrastructure or build in their vicinity including issuing approvals as required. The company manages all infrastructure facilities, from control and monitoring centers to small infrastructures in city neighborhoods.
For a national product influencing millions of residents, the app home screen plays a crucial role in making real-time decisions and discerning critical events. Hence, meeting daily challenges involves empowering users, facilitating inquiries analysis, promoting team collaboration, and providing real-time task updates.
Yet, in a world full of competing information, emphasizing key insights to ease users’ daily app routines becomes a challenge.
A recent University of California study illustrates this, showing that attention to a specific dashboard screen wanes before shifting. It reveals an increased error likelihood with more distractions and prolonged focus. Simply put, the time available for understanding specific content reduces significantly.
Moving forward, we studied how information overload affects task management, workload, and crisis prioritization. Surveys across different roles provided valuable insights.
We found that cross-referencing data across various regions impacted decision quality. Over 30% of inquiries were duplicate tasks, leading to a ‘switch cost’—the mental effort required to refocus on a new activity.
Reviewing the organization’s operations showed substantial time spent on document handling, communication, and control of inquiries. We also identified the need for greater role-player integration, vital for adaptive coping strategies.
In essence, crucial information should be presented clearly, rapidly scannable, and easy to understand at a glance. emphasizing urgent system requests, assessing them against incoming ones, managing duplicates, and providing overlap reasons aim to ease the company’s decision-making load.
Addressing these challenges demanded a deep understanding of various system modules and establishing company data prioritization to be able to refine and reflect only the essential data for the user, allowing him to act and make real-time decisions. Concurrently, it allowed me to develop my user-flow creation abilities and enhance my communication, organizational, and problem-solving skills.
I served as the lead product designer for the national water company’s project. My responsibilities included managing the project from the definition of requirements through delivery, designing the user experience and application interface, the visual design of the screens and graphics, designing the geographic mapping system, and integrating all the components into one cohesive system. Additionally, I worked closely with the relevant teams at the water company to deeply understand the needs and ensure the solution addressed them optimally.
In this case study, I’ll outline the steps and insights that steered me from initial discovery to final delivery.
User interviews were a central and important part of the research and design process for the product. I conducted a series of in-depth personal interviews with employees at the company who used the old system.
As preparation for the interviews, we first held a brainstorming session as a team and collected a list of key questions and points to discuss with the users. During the interviews themselves, I used various techniques such as rating cards for actions and drawing prototypes from memory, to identify user preferences and understand what information was retained in their consciousness.
The findings from the interviews served as a very important basis for making design decisions. After analyzing the findings, I held additional meetings with the product manager and team to jointly discuss the issues that arose and map out possible solutions to improve the user experience. This allowed us to translate the insights from the interviews into a more intuitive and user-friendly design solution for the users.
Based on research insights and deep familiarity with the water company’s users, I designed an interactive system for them with a simple and friendly user interface.
I carefully planned the user experience and created intuitive and efficient workflows for them. I incorporated clear visual and textual elements and ensured accessibility and usability for all users.
I emphasized quick and easy task performance while improving the user experience and productivity. The solution addressed the needs optimally identified in the research based on understanding their unique needs.
Provides background and key facts about the inquiry to give an initial understanding of the case before in-depth handling.
The app includes a Geographic Information System (GIS) enabling visual mapping of the data. It allows users to load mapping files and mark them using a toolkit. Additionally, the solution integrates the ability to export their data.
The toolbar was moved to a side drawer that opens on demand, increasing the workspace.
The toolkit allows users to perform various actions such as marking, coloring and drawing.
With smart inquiries prediction, duplicate inquiries are prioritized first.
Customization by selecting sections and files. Preview for efficient editing.
The app improved the user experience of employees through a friendly interface and efficient workflows, significantly shortened response times to inquiries thereby saving valuable time and frustration, and displayed information on a map which assisted better decision-making.
The project greatly contributed to improving my design skills and adopting a more methodical and measured approach to design processes. I learned that adding new features requires in-depth thinking about user needs and priorities, not just technically adding elements. Questions like “What’s more important to the user?” helped determine proper priorities and logic before interface design. Additionally, I discovered the value in reusing existing refined and well-tested components.
Moreover, it was important to receive feedback from diverse stakeholders – both internal and external. I heard encouraging voices and constructive criticism alike, which helped improve the solution.
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