Agile Data Preparation

Project Overview

Agile Data Preparation is a self-service data cleaning application providing data discovery, integration, and transformation capabilities. It enables business analysts and data scientists to quickly transform raw data into actionable, easily consumable information. By simplifying the way users discover and shape data, this application provides them with greater agility to respond to new data sources, business requirements, and market opportunities. In this project, I collaborated with researchers, product managers, developers and other designers on all phases including Immersion, Research, and Design.

Project Type: Product Design

Role: UX, UI, Research

Duration: Oct, 2016 - Apr, 2017

Tool: Sketch, Keynote, Photoshop

Design Thinking Process

Immersion

Domain Study: Use Case - "Why do we need Data Preparation?"

Domain Study: Ecosystem - "What does a Data Preparation ecosystem look like?"

Domain Study: Role & Collaboration - "How would different roles work together in this process?"

Goal - "What would an ideal data preparation experience look like?"

Timeline - "What's the high-level strategy?"

Research

Research Process - “How do we get closer to our users?“

Expert Interview

7 Data Experts

Focus Group

3 User Archetypes

Comparative Analysis

9 Data Preparation Tools

Card Sorting

8 Key Features

User Persona - “Who's our user?“

User Story - "How does the user interact with the system?“

Design

As mentioned above, we invested abundant time in early-stage immersion and research, which fundamentally supported and catalyzed the following design phase. With research going on in parallel, we kicked off our design work by reviewing the structural hierarchy and creating a more detailed information architecture. After that, we continuously collaborated with the researcher and graphic designer to proceed with the process from wireframes to hi-fi deliverables.

Information Architecture - "How does the system structure look like?"

The first thing that we did in the design phase was clarify the hierarchy of different functionalities by creating this Information Architecture diagram. IA is essential as it would not only reveal what was ahead of us but also trigger our thoughts for task flow. Along with the design progress, we kept evolving IA as well to calibrate our design track consistently.

Hand Sketches - "What's the first image in our minds?"

With a holistic view in mind, we started converting abstract mental models into concrete screen design. By creating rapid hand sketches, we were able to depict the skeleton of this app including the overall architecture, layers, layouts as well as key functions. On the other hand, hand sketches provided an efficient communication platform where designers could share their thoughts at a low cost.

Wireframe - "From where to where?"

The next step was to digitalize all the sketches and figure out clear flow(s) with wireframes. As listed above, we designed step-to-step wireframes for the top 5 features through 3 iterations.