Administrative Portal - ERT
Designing a more cohesive administrative portal for ERT employees.
MY ROLE
TEAM
DURATION
Research
User Testing
Prototyping
3 Designers
2 Developers
4 months
Overview
How can we update the administrative portal to allow admins to do their job more effectively?
At ERT it’s essential for internal workers to be assigned to various clinical trials, studies, and projects. However, administrative tools were being stretched across different platforms. This caused administrators to spread their activities and time across different platforms inefficiently.
Our job was to figure out how to improve the administrative portal workflows into a more succinct experience so that admin users can complete their duties faster
THE PROBLEM
The current portal administrative tasks are spread across various platforms, leading employees to confusion and time wastage.
THE GOAL
Create a new administrative portal that would reduce the amount of navigation per task, decrease the amount of time spent on tasks, and increase the ease of use for admin tasks.
Research
To determine what to integrate into the new product we needed to understand all the admin tools and how they’re used
To begin, we looked into all the current tools on the administrative platforms. We also gained a better understanding of the tool’s functions, how they’re used, and by which teams.
Findings & Analysis
Making sure the new platform is easy to use for all audience members
From the research we discovered 17 administrative tools were being used by a variety of users, internal and external. To ensure ease of use we had to focus on a few important features:
Navigation: Making sure it was easy to navigate for first time and repeat users so that they could quickly complete their tasks
Global Usage: We had to ensure that all the necessary tools were present so employees nationally and internationally could easily use the portal
Combining All the Tools Into One: Despite the amount of tools needed, the UI had to be clean and recognizable
Usability Tests
Using our prototypes, I conducted five usability testing sessions with internal employees
Since we had an existing portal layout, we were able to conduct usability tests using high-fidelity prototypes. We were also able to keep a global familiarity with the portal by building off an existing layout, which allowed us to get insightful feedback that shortened the overall time spent on the project.
To conduct these usability tests, we asked users to complete a series of tasks while speaking their thoughts out loud.
ADDING A NEW USER - ACCOUNT CREATION
During scenario 2 of the usability test, interviewees were asked to add a user to a role. However, most users had trouble determining if adding a user would simultaneously invite that user to create an account if they did not have one already.
UNCLEAR LANGUAGE
During scenario 2 of the usability test, after adding a user to a role. Interviewees struggled to determine if the user had been invited due to the use of both “authorized” and “invited” in the confirmation message.
DOING MULTIPLE TASKS AT ONCE
During scenario 4 of testing, interviewees were asked to delete a role. A few users expected to be able to delete all users at once before deleting the role instead of having to go through and select one user at a time.
UNCLEAR EXPERIENCE
Overall, during the usability test most users had difficulty adding permissions to the new role they created because they expected to be able to add permissions within the role management page.
High Fidelity
Delivering changes to address user frustration and confusion
ADDING A NEW USER - ACCOUNT CREATION NOTIFICATION
To address the concern about inviting users that did not have an existing account, we had the “invite a user” step fail if the user does not have a exiting GSSO account. We also adjusted the alert message to let the admin know that the user will need to be invited to create an account. Admins would be able to do this by using the new “Invite New User” button instead.
CLARIFYING THE LANGUAGE
Many users struggled with understanding the difference between “authorized” and “invited.” To fix this, we made the language more consistent by using one wording: “invited” and by creating a confirmation screen that lets them know which user has been invited to create an account and which user has been successfully assigned to the study.
DOING MULTIPLE TASKS AT ONCE - DELETING USERS
Before deleting a role, administrators have to delete all of the users from the role. To save time we created a global delete icon that would allow the administrator to delete all the assigned users at once instead of deleting them one by one.
CREATING A CLEARER EXPERIENCE
To address the users being unable to find out where to add permissions, I made permissions into it’s own separate tab so it would be clearly visible to the user.
Reflection & Impact
This was a large project with many parts with an impact that stretched to Great Britain and Germany. Overall, this project taught me more about effectively user interviewing, cross-functional collaboration, and designing internally.
This new portal created a more succinct process for administrators and increased productivity by 20%.