Alexander McIlwraith

Brief: Acreage report

This project was a replacement for an existing system. The purpose of this system is to collect information required to complete underwriting for an insurance system for a government agency. As the lead designer on this project, I created mockups and worked closely with development staff to ensure that UX and accessibility requirements were met as well as completing the visual design implementation. Goals for this project included:

  • Simplifing the user experience for a common reporting task
  • Collecting only as much information as was required, and reducing cognitive load by deriving information from existing sources where possible
  • Ensuring layout worked well on mobile to make it easier to complete at the source of the information: often in the field for agricultural products - the product it replaced was built for a desktop world and reflected this in both design and visual esthetic

Design exploration

  • The desktop version was responsive and allowed for better use of the larger screen.
  • Mobile acreage report: reducing the number of fields allowed it to be displayed easily on a smaller screen.
  • The previous version of this system placed a lot of cognitive load on the user as some farmers would have multiple “arrangements” they had to determine the location each piece of information needed to fill in
  • Created wireframes to simplify the amount of data the user needed to provide in a way that simplified reporting including auto completing fields that could be calculated
  • The majority of reporting arrangements are quite simple, but complex arrangements needed to be accommodated as well. This was done by allowing users to collapse sections. My design ensured that we had error markers still visible on sections that had diagnosable errors
  • Allowing users to minimise completed sections, created challenges with allowing users affordances to help them prevent and recover from errors

Process and approach

  • A journey map provided hightlights of 6 pages of user research, highlighting the most problematic areas of the journey.
  • Analysed survey diary study looking for reflections from users to make improvements to the product
  • Demonstrated user journey through the product with a journey map expressing user frustration, making recommendations for improvements
  • A journey map based on the diary study data allowed me to help the team understand where users were struggling and highlight areas for improvement
  • Highlighting positives from research created greater receptivity to making improvements
  • Produced wireframes in showing product in multiple states to highlight error handling and interaction design
  • User feedback allowed me to make recommendations to improve the user experience including the navigation to the product and elements that customers felt were missing. Some recommendations are currently being implemented as updates while others are still being prioritised

Final design

  • Decreased the amount of information collected by more than 50%.
  • In the first year of launch, increased satisfaction by 7% over the previous year.
  • Usage analytics shows reduced page views in comparable sections of the application with increased online reports being up over previous years