Pre-pixel sketches that helped us communicate early ideas

From Vison to Reality

Timeframe: 2015- 2018

Role: Head of Design (also played user research and UX design roles)

Collaborators: Design team at Quid (Acquired by Netbase Quid)


Overview: I lead a round of user research with 25 users and learned some of the key areas of focus for Quid. After this research, our growing Design team worked toward a vision for the product. Over the next few years, we made tangible steps toward that vision, addressing key user concerns. The story below shows how, as a team, we envisioned Quid’s future and helped turn it into a reality over the next few years.

Search

Capturing the user’s intent via Search was difficult in the original Quid. As such, increasing the opportunity for user feedback was helpful in order to indicate the types of documents that would be included within one’s results. Mary Kate did an amazing job with visual search, resulting in an invention disclosure, Boolean Query Composer.

Responsible UX Vision Designer: Mary Kate Hayden

Search: The Vision

  • Screenshot of a news search webpage with a dark background, showing the search term "electric vehicles" entered, and the user Ashley Stephenson signed in.

    Familiar Search Bar with Autocomplete

  • Screenshot of a news website search results page for wearable technology topics, displaying various categories such as phone, internet of things, software, watch, apps, healthcare, personal, monitor, clothing, energy, track, glass, pulse, space, vehicle.

    Treemap results highlighting key topics, companies, or people.

  • Screenshot of a news search on wearable technology topics, showing categories like phone, watch, clothing, healthcare, sensors, fashion, apps, pulse, steps, wrist, glass, track, access, and care.

    Treemap re-renders as Boolean query builds

Search: The Reality

Responsible UX Designer: Radhika Sawhney

The company was not quite ready for a visual search, but we compromised by showing a faceted search, where facets included topic areas were a reasonable step. Additionally to narrowing the search via filters, related search terms were added to allow users to broaden their search when appropriate.

Merging Topics: The Vision

Responsible UX Designer: Oriana Love

Each user had her own mental model of the world, or leveraged the ontologies offered by her industry. As such, when Quid’s unsupervised NLP algorithm generated topics, it often did not match their categorization. As such, the ability to for users to influence the topical clusters from Quid was key. As part of this envisioning session, Invention Disclosures were filed, Extracting Insightful Nodes from Graphs and Summarized network graph for semantic similarity graphs of large corpora.

  • A visualization of data clusters related to self-driving cars, including topics like heart rate, blood pressure, healthcare, vehicle technology, activity tracking, and fashion, with a timeline from January to October 2015 at the bottom.

    Alternative, Aggregated Network View Showcasing Exemplar Nodes

  • A data visualization graphic showing various interconnected topics related to self-driving cars, including healthcare, heart rate, blood pressure, activity, wear, fitness tracker, vehicle, cars, driver, road, health, patients, apple, watch, google glass, fashion, wear, movement, power, production, efficiency, glass, flying, reality, supply, and blood.

    Drag and Drop to Merge Topics that were conceptually similar

  • A network graph showing keywords and articles related to self-driving cars, with nodes representing topics like Tesla, Nissan, Ford, and car accidents, connected by lines indicating relationships. The color scheme includes green and red nodes, with a timeline timeline at the bottom from January to October 2015.

    Apply a Sentiment Lens

Merging Topics: The Reality

Responsible UX Designer: Oriana Love

We didn’t tackle all the ideas from the Vision all at once. First we introduced better labels, using a new labeling technique, Positioning labels on graphical visualizations of graphs to prevent label collision and allow for maximum readability. Then, we surfaced the ability to merge in a visible way. Eventually, the Quid team did introduce an aggregated network view in some of their Quid App work.

Storytelling: the Vision

Responsible UX Designer: Oriana Love

Through our user research, we discovered that our users sat in the position of influencers to their decision makers. The most effective way to influence was to help convey the result of their findings, and telling and communicating a story regarding how they arrived at their conclusion. As such, we prioritized the ability to tell a story.

  • Flowchart with interconnected nodes representing wearable technology topics, including heart rate, blood pressure, fitness tracking, clothing, gadgets, food, vehicle, and healthcare, with a timeline at the bottom and saved view thumbnails on the right.

    Capture a Version of the Analysis

  • Screenshot of a data visualization project titled 'TECH TRENDS: 2015 - Wearables' by Ashley Stephenson, showing various analytics and visualizations related to wearable technology trends, including search data, network overview, themes, sentiment, and major players, with a drag-and-drop interface at the bottom for building a story.

    Build the Story

  • A network visualization diagram with interconnected circles representing themes such as health & wellness, activity, wear, fitness tracker, vehicle, cars, driver, road, apple, watch, google glass, glass, flying, reality, fashion, wear, movement, power, production, efficiency, andiot, billion, supply, shared by Ashley Stephenson.

    Annotate + Share

Storytelling: The Reality

Responsible UX Designer: Anna Spisak

Storytelling is a great example where the reality turned out even stronger than the original vision. Users could capture images of their analysis throughout the process, annotate, share, and even download a powerpoint containing their analysis.