SUMMARY

BUSINESS PROBLEMS

The problem here was two-pronged. Firstly, customers who used Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine (AIE, now Attivio Platform) to unify information from multiple structured and unstructured data sources, wanted an out-of-the-box UI which will show them value proposition right after ingested a candidate data set. Secondly, Attivio's internal personas like Sales Engineers and Solutions Engineers, would spend a lot of time writing UI code, often repeatedly, to build custom experiences for demonstration of concepts for the customers. This would elongate an already lengthy sales cycle. But after an entire review, additional problems need to be solved, most notably:

• Need a one click ready to load and launch UI that would highlight all key benefits of Attivio Query Language, like Facets, Key Phrases, Results
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• App should be structured such that it is a living training document so as to explain how to query AIE Engine hence a learn and customize experience for new engineers
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• App should be the default PaaS UI for newly on-boarded customers on the cloud

SOLUTION

A new web application was built iteratively that would ship a non-optional module with AIE. Each one of the following aspects of AIE should be a UI component in itself such that engineer can turn it off or on:

• A Results View
• AIE Simple and Advanced Query Languages
• Facets
• Auto Complete
• Field Expressions
• Image thumbnails and Previews
• Content Security
• Relevancy Tuning
• Query Time Join
• Highlighting
• Sorting
• Spell Suggestions
• Synonym Expansion

...and more.

I wrote about the product at its release. Product has evolved since then as a toolkit with newer UI technology, but the under lying business problems it solves remain the same.

MY ROLE

I was the sole UX/UI Architect on the project. After collecting all the requirements from Sales Engineers, CTO, Chief Architects and VP of Product, I came up with the design, architecture and implementation of the module, in every sprint. I took a Lean UX approach on this project. In each sprint (3 weeks long), I framed the iteration of the problem, designed the mocks in Balsamiq and reviewed with internal stakeholders (Chief Architects, Solutions Engineers) and then by customers. Feedback was factored into the next sprint. I tested the product using moderated user tests for usability for ability of the solution to meet different business needs. I specifically designed a test strategy where I tasked Solution Engineers to install the AIE, account for some custom needs and customize the components.

For my incremental approach with sprints, see here.

EXTERNAL LINK