Reflection on using learning launch To check product usability

Challenge

I’m a software engineer and I work in a company that develops financial and operational data  visualization tool. We noticed a decline in the usage of our product and we made it a goal to find  out why and also come up with a solution in due time. My team and I used other design thinking tools such as ethnography to understand the  environment and tasks most of our clients use our product for and we’ve found out that even  though the product does what the client wants, they feel overwhelmed with the interface  because there is a lot of buttons and options to click or select to accomplish a task.

Selection

We chose to use the learning launch tool to prototype and test the newly redesigned interface to  understand how it affected their work and whether they easily use it to accomplish their daily  tasks.

Application We launched the prototype of the new interface version alongside the production version and  routed 20% percent of our users to the new interface. We collected feed-backs and iterated on  the interface designs.

We also organized workshops to witness how they used the new design and collected more data/ feed-backs and made relevant changes to the new interface.

Insight

By using the learning launch tool we identified many pain points of our users and corrected most of our wrong assumptions about how we thought the clients use our product.

We found out that our users used the interface easily when the buttons and options were  organized according to a particular business process they usually undertake daily.

Approach

Using the learning launch tool was the best option for solving this problem because we got the  chance to test our assumption and then iterated very quickly based on user feed-backs till the  product was at an acceptable level. This made most of our client happy because their needs  where put into consideration while designing the new interface.

