User Experience case study: Report Filtering
	Posted by Kevan Ho at Apr 11, 2008 02:37 PM CDT Categories: Usability

Being a usability guy, I recently read about two design paradigms for navigating through lots of data that resonated with me:

• Seek Paradigm: the users ask for what they want 
• Show Paradigm: everything is displayed and the user explores and organizes it.

One of our recent projects, Report Writer, is the latter: the whole world of report data is available to the user, and we’ve created a tool that empowers users to easily build, organize, and extract the data they find most meaningful.  For our upcoming release our usability & design team refreshed a part of the bigger Report Writer tool, and I thought it'd be a good case study to talk about how we approach user experience. 

We went from this:

And we finished with this:

Some of the questions we asked ourselves at the beginning of the project were:

• What are our users trying to achieve when they get to this step of creating & defining filters?
• What kind of control do they expect, and can we give it to them without compromising performance?
• How tedious is the current usability and can that be corrected?
• What’s the user experience we’re going for?
• Will the result provide a pleasant, effective, and efficient user experience?

Working with other departments, our team received A LOT of support to produce this, and had a plenty of data internally and externally to help us along.

One data point concerned the oft-repeated client pain: system response.  To address this, then, to reduce page reloads and improve the system response we implemented AJAX so not every create-a-filter and edit-a-filter is a page refresh.  Everything's achievable inline, whether creating, editing, or deleting.  For example, clicking the “Create a filter” button in the top left—the primary action—causes a new filter to slide down beneath the button with all the filter configurations inline.

Lastly, to help make this powerful tool easy to use, we've moved away from the database-sounding query language to common plain language descriptions, enumerators, and filter labels.  The result is amazing, our usability testing showed users able to quickly grasp the tools with virtually zero training.

We're excited to see how client users respond and look forward to making similar changes in other areas of the product soon.
 

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