Anton

[davekilljoy]

Hey Griffin,

This is pretty cool, thanks for sharing. Unfortunately, LinkedIn has very strict guidelines for using 3rd party tools to store proprietary information (participant name/data, concepts tested, product info, etc.) so I will not be able to give this a thorough test using my actual team and projects.

That being said, I did a quick once-over of the product and did a dummy project that was structurally very similar to my current work, and a few things jumped out about the UX:

• While elegant visually, I think the placement of different commands across the 4 corners of the screen make things harder rather than easier. It doesn't feel particularly consistent (+ and 'Done' were in the same spot, which makes some sense but I kept looking for how to finish my adding a project or summary. The main content is somewhat suspended in the center of the page and I was expecting buttons that acted on it to be closer, more visually associated. The 'Done' button in particular seems to blend into the BG and I lost it even after seeing it there on a previous page.

-The product lost me pretty early, on the 'add new project' flow where it asks me to choose whether my project is ethnographic or screen-based... I rarely do one or the other, most if not all of my projects contain elements of both. For my current one, I couldn't figure out what the right option was. While I understand the simplicity of having broad buckets of project types that allow you to prepackage functionality, an a-la-carte model where I can pick and choose which methods/aspects I wish to include would be far more versatile and useful. I could even see it helping me structure my studies, giving me a 'toolkit' of sorts to consider as I build it in the UI. I'd want to be able to select an ethnographic portion, and a prototype portion as two halves of the same project - in the current flow, I'd need to create two instances in order to do that which somewhat negates the point of using this over something simpler but more versatile like Gdocs.

• Finally, I couldn't see a way to add my teammates to a particular project. I didn't spend too much time scrutinizing it, but it didn't seem central to the flow. Maybe I just missed it. It seemed strange that only one person could add notes for a session - does this mean that each person's thoughts would only be added at the very end? I think that's fine, but again - what's the added value over a real-time service like Gdocs?

Hope this helps, happy to discuss further.

[griffinthomson]

Glad to hear much of this is on your radar - I think it can be hard to make decisions about something like UI or button placement... in my experience it always devolves into the two camps of "They'll learn it!" or "It's not intuitive enough to ever learn!", with the truth being somewhere in between. In this case I just honestly got a bit fatigued moving my mouse cursor from one corner to another every time I wanted to take any kind of action. It's such a minor thing that becomes quite major once you've had to do it a dozen times in the span of two minutes.

What I've found to be a helpful tool to focus the conversation is to ask what the value of placing them that far apart is... is it meant to differentiate the actions? If so, are there other ways to accomplish that while keeping the areas the same? Is it meant to be a branded action that lives throughout mobile and desktop? Etc.

Overall, the UI feels disparate / far apart for me. I'm not sure why the text and the project items are as small as they are, and why everything is so far apart. It feels like it's trying to scale for hundreds of projects that I don't have yet, and may not ever get to. The actions being spread to the corners contribute heavily to that, but it goes deeper - the buttons/icons/text are all tiny blips on a huge field of color. I have to squint to read some of the lighter, smaller text... it looks sortof like Evernote at times but harder to read.