NI System Advisors Re-design
Overview
National Instruments(NI), is an American multinational company with international operation and produces automated test equipment and virtual instrumentation software. NI’s online system advisors help users create a custom system based on their specific requirements. Users can use them to choose compatible hardware, software, accessories, and services and then save their selections as configurations for easy quoting and purchasing later.
Design Approach
Discover | Research Methodology
Define goal of user interviews
I defined the high-level theme of the interview. This exercise helped me to identify the key areas/topics to focus on in user interviews.
Identify and recruit users
For the interviews we selected 6 users from all around the globe who has used our NI advisors and scheduled the interview
on MS teams.
User Interviews
Starting with questions that are easy to answer, we made users comfortable. Followed by more open-ended questions, we tried to understand users pain points and what are they expecting from the new advisors.
Affinity mapping & analysis
To make sense of qualitative data gathered in research, we got into affinity mapping to organize related facts into distinct clusters. At this stage, we summarized our findings, identifying underlying problems and determining priorities.
Discover | Research Top Findings
No specifications about the NI hardware on the advisor itself
Users have to use the search bar and have to go the product description page to get specifications and information.
Lack of modern UI
System is not responsive and design components are archaic and inconsistent with the website design and also users mentioned that the current system is slow.
No collaboration with the team on the advisor
Users cannot collaborate with their teams in the current advisor. As users can choose hardware, software, accessories, and services on the advisors, so they require multiple people from different branch to collaborate with each other to configure a single system.
Pre-configured templates
Users mentioned that the system they build are somewhat similar to one another and in the current advisor, they can’t duplicate a configuration. Users also mentioned that consider providing a pre-configured template for different applications, so they can simply duplicate that template and only add or remove few things as this will save them time and effort.
Lack of intuitiveness
A novice user requires external help to use the advisors for the first time. UI and in-app help is not self-explanatory and intuitive.
Define | Problem Statement
The current advisor lacks essential specifications about the NI hardware, forcing users to search and navigate to the product description page for necessary information. Additionally, the system suffers from a lack of modern UI, unresponsiveness, and outdated design components that do not align with the website design. Furthermore, the advisor does not facilitate collaboration among team members.
Define | Persona
Define | Customer Journey Map
Ideate | User Flow
Design | Wireframing
Old Design
New Design
Test | Remote Unmoderated Usability Tests
Due to the project timeline, we were not able to perfrom moderated usability test so we used UserTesting to run the remote unmoderated usability test.
No. of participants : 10
Location : US & UK
Target Audience : Participants who have previosuly used NI advisors
After collecting all the user inputs and sort them into insights, pain points and design ideas, I provide recommendation and the design team implemented it.