Azavea (now Element 84) designs and builds geospatial web applications, data analytics, and research tools for clients to help answer complex civic and environmental questions.
As a User Experience Designer at Azavea I worked closely with other designers (in a UX team of 4), project managers, developers and clients in an Agile way.
Below you can explore a selection of 3 projects that I have worked on. Due to NDA’s, all projects are anonymized.
Contact me if you want to learn and see more.
Selected projects
1
Large financial institution
UX audit and UI changes for an existing feature on a charitable giving website to boost usability.
2
Sustainability non-profit
End-to-end UX/UI design for an application that provides more transparency in supply chains.
3
Citizen science platform
UX research to identify opportunities for improvements for a citizen science platform.
1 Supply chain insights
A new standalone application that provides companies insights into their product supply chain based on environmental and social data.
Overview
This non-profit wants to help companies move to a more sustainable production process. One of their services is a supply chain analysis by in-house data experts. It’s a manual process and is therefore very time consuming.
There currently is a wait list for this service. To help more customers, they want to turn this into a standalone application.
What we did
Full end-to-end UX and UI design: 2 client workshops, desk research, 5 1-hour long user interviews, wireframing, prototyping, client feedback sessions, user testing, visual design and hand-off.
My role
I was the lead designer on this project. My team provided input and feedback whenever needed.
Tools & timeline
I used Miro for the workshops, Dovetail to analyze the interviews, Figma for design and prototyping. It took 6 months to complete while I also worked on other projects.
Challenges
This was the first time for this client to have a digital application developed. This meant that we had many UX strategy sessions to figure out what this application would do, what it wouldn’t do and who we we’re designing it for. Since this is a pretty complex, data heavy product, it took us some time to fully understand how it would work.
From the user interviews it became clear that the ‘old’ visual outputs of the analysis left room for undesired, incorrect interpretations. This became one of our main challenges when designing the data visualizations.
The other main challenge was to design a simple, intuitive data intake process and visual presentation of the results for a potentially very large amount of products from different origins.
Results
Please contact me if you’re interested in seeing what the final designs look like.
Reflection
The client specifically pointed out how much it helped them that we had a step by step process of figuring out what and for who this application would be.
They were especially impressed when they saw the fully interactive prototype and realized that I had thought out every potential flow a user could go through in the application.
Ideally, there would be more time left for visual design towards the end of the project. But with more time spent defining the product the client was very happy with the end result.
2 Similar charities
A new feature for a charitable giving website to help people discover more charities.
Overview
This website, that helps people find and donate to charities, is live and continuously undergoing improvements. The client internally worked on a new feature that would show people similar charities when looking at a charity page.
The initial concept and design were done by the client but before developing and launching it, they asked for Azavea’s UX and UI expertise. They mainly had some concerns around AI ethics and relevance of the feature.
We were asked to validate the current design and see if any adjustments/changes were needed.
What we did
User research and UI changes:
1 client workshop, desk research, 10 30-min long user interviews, UX audit of current state, wireframing, prototyping, client feedback sessions.
My role
I conducted the user research and made the design changes together with another UX designer on my team.
Tools & timeline
We used Dovetail to analyze the interviews, Figma for design and prototyping. It took 3 months to complete while we also worked on other projects.
Ethics and relevance
To find out how the charities felt about having other, similar charities shown on their page, we talked to charities and an ethics/AI expert. The main need that arose was more transparency about how the algorithm works, specifically which information is used to select similar charities.
During the interviews we did a short user test with a working prototype. We for example asked if the charities seem similar to them. Most people didn’t think so because the initial filters people used to find charities, did not get applied to the new similar charities feature. A clear point for improvement!
Results
Based on the interviews and the UX audit we made a few small UI changes that ended up having a big impact on the usability of the feature. It also made the client confident that this feature was now in a good state to be developed and launched.
Feedback we received from the client:
“The new feature looks just lovely”
“The new feature looks and operates better than I could have dreamed - really great work”
“We’re a cautious group, Azavea was a great partner in that - we’re grateful for Sophie and her colleague who could turn it around quickly. Comforting to bring that to the leadership team. We’re in a very different place, thanks to Azavea’s help.”
3 Citizen science platform
UX research for a map-based citizen science platform that allows people to upload, view and analyze data which supports science projects.
Background
This citizen science platform is up and running and has multiple projects that people contribute to.
To inform a next round of development, we did user research to learn from the users how they use the platform and what their pain points are.
What we did
Our research included 9, 1-hour long interviews with 3 different types of users & a heuristic analysis of the current state of the platform. We summarized our findings in a report along with a presentation to the client.
My role
I conducted this user research process together with another UX designer on my team. We distributed the work evenly.
Tools & timeline
We used Dovetail to analyze the user interviews and Google sheets for the heuristic analysis. Google docs and slides were used for the report and the presentation. It took 3 months to complete while also working on other projects.
Key findings
From the heuristic analysis, the highest priority issues were related to accessibility and the user interface to create data visualizations.
In the user interviews we again heard that the interface to create visualizations is confusing and too complex. Since this platform has a very wide range of users (any age, education level), it was clear that this process has to become a lot more intuitive to make it easy and fun to analyze and visualize data.
To clearly and effectively communicate our findings to the client we created an impact/effort matrix in the report. This visually shows the client how much the user experience can be improved by addressing an issue and how much effort it would be for designers and developers to implement the changes.
Reflection
Accessibility issues are usually not brought up by users during interviews. I think it is therefore important for a UX/UI expert to do a heuristic analysis or an accessibility audit to identify these issues and bring them to every ones attention.
The impact/effort matrix turned out to be very helpful. The client was already aware of some of our findings but this process also uncovered new issues. The report helped the client to decide to first focus on a re-design of the data visualization interface. They have also started the process to address the accessibility issues.