Lead design for the team building a new text editor for, Revit, a large desktop application for building information modeling. The existing editor had been added in a very early release of the product. Over time it had been modified and extended many times. While the development team worked to isolate and refactor the code I lead a research effort with our customers to understand their needs and pain points with the existing tools.
This research effort included customer interviews, an online forum and surveys. We also conducted a baseline survey for measuring improvements. This baseline used SUS (system usability scale) and CSAT (customer satisfaction) surveys.
Knowing that editing text is a very large problem space I ran studies for ranking possible features. With a very active user community we were able to prioritize requests that actually would help our customers complete their work.
For this multi-phase and multi-year project I also filled the scrum master roll on the team. With such a technical project it is often difficult to maintain customer focus but with me filling both SM and UX rolls I was able to keep customers involved via online forums and by inviting customers directly into our sprint reviews.
With the organization moving to new tools to manage backlogs I kept track of our burn up charts via an extensive Excel spreadsheet. This gave the team a very detailed look at how the project was progressing. It also enabled our stakeholders to get a visual feel for when the project would complete and with in our estimated "cone of uncertainty".
For the final editor numerous UI configurations were tried as we zeroed into the chosen configuration. For the final design we chose to separate the UI into two separate ribbon contextual tabs. This enabled the editor workflow from working with the text block itself down to editing the actual text within the text block. This UI configuration was very well received and tested well with new and experienced customers.
Overall the project was received very well from customers. It received an 81.3 SUS score and has removed a major pain point from the product.