Satyajit Das

Business Analyst Online

Business Analyst Online (BAO) is a Web-based Rich Internet application to help realtors, retailers, and other commercial businesses generate on-demand reports and maps to evaluate demographics, consumer spending, and market potential of business locations.

Role: User Experience Architect

Done at: Data and Commercial Solutions Team, ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute, Redlands, CA)

Duration: Four Months

Tasks: Brainstorming, User Research, Persona Creation, Competitor analysis, Information Architecture, Task Flow Diagrams, Task Analysis, Low Fidelity Prototypes, Wireframing, Usability Evaluation, Interface/Visual Design, Interaction Specs.

Introduction

Business Analyst Online(BAO) is the Web version of the Business Analyst desktop suite, an extensively used GIS in government and private sectors.  The usage analytics confirmed that the existing business solution was little market penetration than its previous version due to its difficult navigation and less intuitive interaction.

Solution

The re-design of the application was carried out with the focus on rich interaction and user experience with drive from ESRI upper management. The new design solution incorporated findings and usage patterns elicited from extensive user research. The solution has a rich interaction with many widget features in selecting locations based on address and geography to generate reports. The UI is customizable according to the users working style and needs. It also enabled a single-screen view of scores of data sources and provided a complete picture that helped users make informed decisions. Users could model multiple scenarios and see the effects of changing a single variable.

Screens of previous interface: worlflow to generate study area on the map.

Methodology

Designing the user experience, conceptualizing the Interaction model for rich interaction on flex, changing the UI workflow from system controlled metaphor to user led experience. I carried out the usability analysis of the existing business solution application. Extensive user research was conducted both by interviewing end users and by studying the usage analytics.Then a peer review was conducted on competitor applications of organizations dealing Geographical information.

This led to collating the requirements document and conceptualizing the workflow, interaction model and navigation schemes. Followed this with some low fidelity prototypes and sketches to generate ideas for the interface. After this was done, we started creating wireframes. This was then made to go numerous iterations after constant feedback from the product management, development team, usability study feedbacks. The wireframes were used for deciding on the interaction and discussed over the product management meetings. This was followed up with the Visual Designs and passed on to the developers along with the UI/visual design and interaction specification documentation.The categorization of the reports, sales patterns and checkout process were left untouched and the data was taken from the existing BAO application.

Usability Study

Process: - This study looks at modifications made to interface to alleviate usability problems identified in a study.  Representative personas were created to identify the users of BAO. Each participant used a series of written scenarios and a prototype of the BAO 9.3 application to perform typical tasks of identifying a site, defining a study area, and ordering reports. Scenarios also asked participants to create a series of thematic maps showing area demographics, income, and house values.

Users: – Five participants were drawn from GIS analyst working for Southern California municipalities. All had GIS expertise; all but one had used the current version of BAO. Participants for the July study were drawn from real estate investors and assessors.

Some User Requested Features: -

•    Ubiquitous Save Site. One participant suggested the Save Site be available from multiple places.

•    Printable tables and graphs. Participants want the ability to print tables and graphs in the Thematic Data palette. One participant commented that she wanted more data than the top five displayed in a graph.

•    Ability to name custom polygons. One participant noted than when she uploads shapefiles, BAO arbitrarily decides what to label those polygons in final reports.

•    Market Profile data segmented by time and category. One participant said his city had a much higher daytime population. This made aggregate report data for restaurants and other services inaccurate. He wanted reports based on daytime and nighttime population. He also said a report on lunch and dinner demand would be more valuable than data that aggregates all restaurant demand.

•    Print icon on tool pallet. Few participants found the Print button for thematic maps in Other Options. When asked, participants suggested a Print icon be added to the left tool pallet.