CASE STUDY - SMART OFFICE SOLUTIONS
NETAS | Istanbul
2012 - 2014
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Ribbon's Smart Office UC clients are intuitive communication tools for delivering voice, video, IM, presence and collaboration capabilities on both desktop and mobile devices. Users gain a common experience across PC, Mac, iOS and Android or a web browser.
Ribbon's Smart Office UC Clients had been known as GenCom Clients before the company was passed into another hand, Ribbon Communications and Netas had been providing unified communication solutions by designing and developing the product family for years.
GOAL AND OBJECTIVE
I contributed to the project on UX research basis.
My responsibility for the project was as follows:
Usability Inspection: Evaluating the usability performance of the current design in order to find out major design flaws and identify UX requirements of the project.
Usability Benchmarking: Benchmarking design decisions against the business requirements and the results of the usability inspections to see whether various proposed improvements made the product more or less successful in achieving its goals. The aim was to apply the best method of justifying design changes.
Multi-media Verification: Performing end-to-end software testing by using various testing techniques.
TEAM
Project and Marketing Managers
Web and Mobile Developers
UI and UX Designers
UX Analyst/Researcher
Eylem Yilmaz: UX Analyst/Researcher
Usability inspection
Usability Benchmarking
Sharing findings with internal and external stakeholders
METHODOLOGY
In this project, I regularly conducted usability benchmarking against the business objectives of the app to see whether various proposed improvements made the app more or less successful in achieving its goals. I also conducted heuristic evaluations to suggest new experiences for the features as occasion requires alongside conducting usability benchmarking.
The main research methods that I used were as follows:
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Usability inspection (Heuristic evaluation)
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Usability benchmarking against the business objectives
USABILITY BENCHMARKING
In this study, I regularly conducted usability benchmarking against the business objectives and change requests. The main steps I have followed are as follows.
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Identifying the key business objective behind the apps.
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Identifying the UX factors which will help to achieve the key objective.
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The ability to search for the contacts easier,
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The ability to view a friend or to make voice/video calls or to send IM in a simple way.
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Proposing a way to work on improving the UX factors by running a usability test to see if there are any problems at the moment with the current version of the apps.
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Measuring the benchmark state of each UX factor by assessing the current performance, e.g. the success rate or efficiency based on the usability metrics. Measuring the performance of the app to get the current values which will be used for comparison later.
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Tracking changes in each UX factor until target values are achieved. Starting improving the interface and testing changes with users to see whether I am getting closer to my target values, e.g. whether the success rates the app by using unmoderated user testing if necessary.
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Testing if the business objective is being met by conducting the heuristic evaluation or competitive analysis comparing the app with a competitor of the app.
GenCom Unified Communications
