How might we improve user understanding of errors?
My Role
Product designer, facilitator
Project Skills/Tools
Design thinking, story mapping, affinity mapping, user flows, user stories, user research
Figma, Miro
Project Overview
At Omatic, I led multiple design sprint workshops to engage and build alignment across different teams. This particular design sprint workshop stemmed from a low score on a previous System Usability Survey, which was around the statement "I felt very confident using the system".
"How confident are you that you can understand the error message and fix the formula settings for proper processing?"
Destination Exceptions
Formula Exceptions
The Problem
Exceptions are data errors in the system. Most of the time, the user facing messaging around exceptions are very technical and do not give the user much context as to how to fix these errors. This has long been a point of confusion for users.
Design Sprint
Day 1: Understand the problem
Day 2: Focus on solutions
Day 3: Prototype
Day 4: Test
Day 5: Iterate
Understanding the Problem
Long-term Goal
Ask The Experts/How Might We
Sprint Questions
Journey Map
Goals
Empower users to understand and resolve their own errors
Provide more visibility when it comes to their data processing errors
Prevent errors from occurring altogether
Focus on Solutions
Sketching
Prototype/Test
We conducted user testing on two solutions:
1. A solution that introduced an additional step in the formula creation process, enabling users to review all decisions made in the formula with the aim of preventing errors.
2. A solution that focused on helping users understand errors by providing actionable steps to fix them.
Review Page
Error Page
Iterate
Review Page
V1
V2
Error Page
Solution 1: Review Page
Adding a step to the formula creation process which allows the user to review all decisions made in the formula, in an effort to prevent errors.
Solution 2: Error Page
Grouping errors by error, providing more resources for users to understand errors, giving them actionable steps to fix them
Updates include link to support, records grouped by error, contextual action buttons, error detail column.
Results
The design sprint's long-term goals and "How Might We?" exercises allowed us to explore additional solutions, like preventing exceptions from happening altogether
We implemented and iterated on two different solutions!
Challenges
Infrastructure- insight into errors
Iteration Time
Next Steps
Infrastructure- Processing pipeline updates
SUS survey
Usability Testing
