Aurelius
User Informed Feature Development
Tools: Stakeholder interviews, primary and secondary research, personas, user journey mapping, sketching, feature recommendations, annotated wireframes, interactive prototyping
Aurelius is a growing and developing information management and data synthesis tool and the next feature my client would like to launch is "Collections." This feature extends the functionality of Aurelius by creating the ability to share a group of notes, key insights, tags and/or documents with someone. The clients requested a well-scoped solution that aligns with current brand guidelines.
Often, Aurelius users create reports to conclude and share their findings and recommendations. These reports are time consuming and likely don't have a connection to the original source data. Collections, is a new function that would allow a user to create reports and share research findings from within Aurelius instead of relying on an external program. The user must be able to take certain information, make a specific shareable group and then send/share it with other people. These curated groups can contain specific notes, key insights, documents, and projects that are relevant to the users information gathering.
The Goals:
1. Discover and access previous inputs of research data through tags within an organizations information database. This data may be collected, combined, and synthesized with new inputs, research and insights within an active project.
2a. Reference project planning materials within Aurelius such as timelines, strategy documents, goals and outlines.
2b. A user gathering and retrieving data from a previous project, should be able to simply understand the project context from where it originated.
3. The user may collaborate on projects with their design team but also feel their research and work is safe and will not be tampered with.
4. The user will have a tool to report research insights, findings and recommendations internally, in turn keeping the raw data sources close to reporting. The report will be shared within Aurelius or exported for external sharing.
Process:
This user journey map represents the persona of Teddy, a practicing UX researcher. Pain Porins and opportunities are identified along his experience working within Aurelius. These moments, directed the next steps of meeting user goals with the proposed features for the collections tool.
Feature Recommendations:
Here is a series of key feature proposals that address user goals within the new 'Collections Tool' of Aurelius.
1. Tagging Standards:
A successful information management and searching system is dependent on language consistency and standards. The success of a user discovering information on a particular topic or subject matter is dependent on the assumption that the original research inputs have been properly tagged with the same language as is being searched. A project that has more than one user inputting data and tagging information is vulnerable to this condition as well.
This proposed feature supports tagging standards across a project and organization. When a tag is entered and it is associated with a previously defined organization standard, a pop up with appear with the standard language, definition and an option to keep or replace the initial tag entry.
2. Project Platform
The project platform is an accessible reference feature intended for both active and completed projects. This platform is the landing place for documents and information associated with a particular project, but not a part of the research and data inputs. Here, planning documents such as goals, timelines, outlines, and other reference materials are collected.
For the current user this feature adds value by keeping a greater amount of project related information internally available within Aurelius instead of referencing an external document. For a user that may be accessing a project or piece of information from a project at a later date in time, the project platform is a great reference tool for understanding the greater context of a project.
3. Accessibility Controls - Invite Collaborators
The collaborators feature is essentially accessibility controls that limit who can manipulate data within a project. Any member of an organization may view information, but only those on a team that have been invited to collaborate may change the data. This helps preserve project data by making it less susceptible to unintentional edits or deletion. Any one that is not a collaborator may still view information for any particular project
4. Sharing and Reporting Tool
The internal reporting feature is unique because it keeps original source data connected to it's output documents. These reports will support collaboration and feedback. Exporting from collections directly will reduce the time necessary to share findings with others. A user can easily select information to be included in a collection. This information can be manipulated, reordered, and annotated. Also, a cover document can be added to the collection. The purpose of the cover document is to assist the recipient in understanding the report to follow. Lastly, this feature allows the user to export a report to PDF for external sharing.