Universal Creative - Ancillary Applications

To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Universal Creative.

PROBLEM

To expand the functionality of their Program Project Management (PPM) system, the Universal Creative IT team had developed a suite of ancillary applications. The intent was to give a select number of users the ability to change data that was not allowed in the PPM system. Initially, all of the applications were developed in MS Access. Some had been migrated to a .net framework, as is. The original technical constraints of MS Access were no longer present, yet they had not been solved. Also, the applications were all hard to use and often generated data issues. 

The focus of this study will be on the Altering PPM Security Permissions application. The Altering PPM Security Permissions application gives the Project Financial Analyst (PFA) the ability to lock a given project to complete the month-end review of the financials. When the project is locked, users would not be able to input or change data.  Once the review is complete, the PFA would unlock the project, restoring the previous user permissions.

During my time at Universal Creative, I was asked to assess the usability of the Altering PPM Security Permissions application along with several others and redesign them based on UX principles.

ABOUT UNIVERSAL CREATIVE

Universal Creative is responsible for designing and building immersive experiences at Universal Parks & Resorts, which consists of four amusement parks and a resort. The Universal Creative team is the process of constructing the fifth amusement park and second resort in Beijing, China. The team is composed of architects, designers, engineers, financial analysts, legal counsel, project managers and is supported by their own IT department. 

Universal Creative is part of Universal Parks & Resorts, a division of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast.

RESEARCH

Heuristic Evaluation

I started the research process by performing a heuristic evaluation. A Heuristic evaluation examines the interface and judges its compliance with recognized usability principles (the "heuristics"). Although there are numerous heuristics, I followed the most commonly used criteria, which is the Heuristics for User Interface Design, developed by Jacob Nielsen.

COgnitve walkthrough

Next, I performed a cognitive walkthrough. A cognitive walkthrough is a usability evaluation method in which an evaluator works through a series of tasks and answers a set of questions. The focus of the cognitive walkthrough is on understanding the system's learnability for the users. They are designed to see whether or not a user can easily accomplish tasks within a given system. It is a task-specific approach to usability.

User experience map

Finally, I created a user experience map. An experience map is a visual diagram of a user’s experience from start to finish when attempting to accomplish a goal. It’s used for understanding general human behavior.

IDEATION

Field Taxonomy

Although the application does not have many data fields, I still wanted to create a field taxonomy. A taxonomy is a hierarchical system of classifying information. The goal is to organize the data in a way that makes it findable, accessible and clear to the user. For me, it helped me to visually identify the relevant data fields and their relationships to one another.

Recommendations

Based on the results of the usability testing, as well as UX design principles, I recommended the following changes for improvement:

• Eliminate data fields that inconsequential to the user’s task or goal

• Organize fields based on data hierarchy

• Use conditional logic to display relevant information based on the input from the user and the data results

• Replace the option to exclude security groups with a toggle to either lock or unlock the permissions 

• Move button placement to the bottom page to maintain continuity with other applications and sites

SOLUTION

Prototype

I redesigned the Altering PPM Security Permissions application to intuitively guide the user to locking/unlocking a project by focusing the user’s attention to a single step at a time until the task is completed. Fitt’s law determined the placement and proximity of each step.

The link below will take you to the prototype, while the task flow below will walk you through the process.

Click here to download and view the Usability Testing & Application Redesign

NEXT STEPS

Additionally, I repeated the same process for the following ancillary application:

• Work Requisition Transfer

• Change in Commitment

• Contract Transfer

• Budget Transfer