A seamless cross-platform experience for GIS developers
Our mission was to transform AppStudio into a product that is easy and pleasant to use for people without development experience create mapping application
The challenge
AppStudio is a development platform for GIS specialists to create and test GIS apps. It is one of Esri’s most complicated products and has three main apps that live across web, mobile and desktop. However, the original design was purely engineering driven, and was done without any real user research. The apps, while powerful and feature-rich, were unintuitive to use and require a high learning curve.
AppStudio 1.0 - Original design
The approach
Start with low hanging fruit
To convince the original product team to adopt human centered design, I decided to start from small things. I started with icons, landing page creation, and gradually moved on to template creation, etc. Although the beginning was slow, it started a butterfly effect. Eventually, the team accepted the value of design and decided to fully commit to an entire platform redesign.
2. Understand the product by talking to team members
In order to jump start on the project, I conducted a range interviews with all stakeholders in one week. The high-intensive effort gave me a concrete understanding of the app, also let me focus on the three major issues in the design of AppStudio for ArcGIS.
The desktop app and mobile app does not connect as a whole
Too many system-centric features
Our visual system is outdated and inconsistent
This approach also created early team‐wide alignment, sparked tons of great ideas and created a strong sense of ownership within team.
Image from internet
3. Create empathy using ad-hoc personas
Instead of conducting a thorough user research that could take 3 months, I created two ad-hoc personas by synthesizing the past usability research and stakeholder interviews. Although they are not as accurate as the personas that are developed from real observations, they served as wonderful tools for the team to build understanding and empathy into the design process.
4. Rapid prototyping and testing
5. Create a reusable design system
To help maintaining consistency in styles and user experience across platforms, I created a reusable design system, and also worked side by side with a front-end developer to transcribe it into code library.
