Advanced Search Feature
Project Objectives
The goal of this feature was to reduce operational costs for managing processes around the setup and delivery of exams. This work was carried out by Project Managers and was a laborious task, incredibly time consuming and expensive to maintain. It also posed huge scalability issues as increasing our customer size involves recruitment, training, ramp-up and a heavy reliance on the business for day to day operations. Our goal was to reduce the hours of project management support needed for customers to manage their day to day requirements, and allow more time for them to focus on other tasks.
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Disclaimer: Some of the information had to be modified for confidentiality purposes of the business.
Research
In the research phase of this project, I arranged user interviews with the Project Managers in the company and they informed me of all of the different pain points that they had with the current process for accessing information about bookings. In short, the project managers needed to be able to search using specific filters to be able to download potentially thousands of results about a candidate's exam and the time it was taking place. With this knowledge about their pain points and understanding the problem, I began to look online at examples of advanced search features. I looked at how Google uses refined search engines and also Jira, which has a very advanced way of searching for information.
An example of the type of advanced search feature I looked at. The feature needed to have very specific filters and the ability to refine the search as it was selected.
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Image source: Jira
Explorations
One of the main pain points that the project managers had with their current process was not being able to bulk download reports. They had to do it one report at a time, which was incredibly time consuming. The feature had to have the option to select all options at a high level, but also to refine the search by filters to reduce the download of 100 files to 10 specific files for example.
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Below are some examples of the first iteration of the advanced search feature
The 'Filter by Organisation' name was one of the first concepts I had for the search feature.
This is a concept of the ability to select multiple search results at once. This would reduce the mundane task of downloading reports one by one that PMs had to do in the past.
3 Amigos and Project Management Validation
In the early stages of the concept work and research, I hosted a validation session with the Customer. By the time we had the validation session, the engineers had some input in the delivery of the MVP and we had to make some tough decisions about what would be the product we would be able to deliver on time. I had many 3 Amigos sessions with members of Product, Design and Engineering where I walked them through my ideas for the new marking module. We broke down a lot of the features into 'Must Haves', 'Should Haves' and 'Nice to Haves' and worked on the MVP Prototype before finally validating it with the customer.
In order to have the validation session I had to arrange a day and time for a Zoom call that would suit multiple people. In this session there were Product Owners, Project Managers, Customer Success Managers and also members of the team from the Customer side. I hosted the meeting and demoed the prototype of the proposed solution. I answered any questions the customer had about the design and the requirements and in the end, they were happy that the design would meet their requirements. The most important aspect was the delivery and meeting the deadlines.
It was very useful to have had these sessions with Product and Engineering before meeting with the customer because when we finally validated it with them, it ensured the work I was doing was deliverable within the scope by engineering and exactly what the customer needed. I enjoyed the collaboration with the multiple teams and the customer but it was challenging at times cutting designs that I knew would be beneficial to Markers but would increase the scope significantly.
User Testing and Regression
I did a number of Usability Tests on this feature to ensure it would be a valuable tool to our team and would help to free up time for Project Managers to focus on other tasks. Fortunately, the tests were successful and there were never any major changes to the UX or UI that came out of the tests. It was very reassuring to know that the feature we were building would greatly reduce my colleagues workload.
Final Solution
The feature was very challenging to find a solution for. It is essentially a search feature with the end goal of downloading potentially thousands of results in a report. The feature was to have 4 filters, as well as a search by date feature and the search results were to be sectioned into 3 columns of separate data. I had to conduct a lot of comparative analysis on advanced search features in order to have an understanding of how it could work.
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It was a very complex project and most of the time very challenging but in the end the business needs of the product were achieved and the usability testing went very well. In the end, a lot of the feature was descoped for the MPV release and the search feature currently only searches by date. This was disappointing because I had spent a lot of time speaking with the project managers to understand their pain points and to ensure the search feature would solve them. The feature would have been even more efficient if it was able to use all of the filters instead of just by date. It was great receiving positive feedback from my colleagues about how much the feature has decreased their workload and simplified what was once an incredibly time consuming task.
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Below are examples of the proposed design for the advanced search feature. The feature includes the ability to filter the search results and select multiple options at once. The second images shows the table following the selection of the results. The user can download the files from this table.
The wording has been changed for confidentiality purposes of the business.
The final image shows the final MVP solution for just searching for files specifically by date. The user could select a start date and an end date for a period of time that an exam was to be taken place. There could potentially be thousands of files downloaded for this time period with details of the exams and the candidates who will be sitting them.
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Again, the wording has been changed for confidentiality purposes of the business.
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