Solving for Search Complexity
Learn about user personas and how understanding more about users can inform complex features like search.
What can you learn
-
Why research is important
-
What are the typical challenges
-
How we think and solve problems
-
You can play with an example prototype we delivered
-
How good design can reveal new business opportunities
Company: Amplion
Duration: ~1 year
Levi
Director of User Experience Design
Davin
Director of Product Management
Who can we help?
We'll begin with "Phoebe," and her needs…
Phoebe is the Diagnostic Product Manager at a prominent biotech company. She has multiple PhDs and 10 years in market development. She looks for business development opportunities by painstakingly reading publications on PubMed, researching drug details, following news and biopharma trends, and gathering competitive intel on diagnostic companies. When she's not in front of a computer, using Python and Excel, she's in meetings and attending conferences.
"I want to know which companies are involved in drug discovery and trials that include specific biomarkers that fit our products, so we can expand sales."
How We Made Personas
Sources:
-
Sales team prospecting calls to get answers to question
-
Discussions with internal subject matter experts
-
Interviews with real people in the target market
The process:
-
Gather insights from all inputs
-
Distill attributes and group them into individual user personas
-
Name each and give them some personality with strong statements and clear needs
-
Associate every user story, presentation, and development task (Jira) with a person
-
Ensure each association clearly indicates the user's need, so solutions address the problem
Discovering Phoebe's Current Workflow
Let's see how Phoebe gets her job done before we deliver our solution. Here's an example of the kinds of queries she writes to find what she needs:
She actually wrote much more complex queries. The real queries include confidential data, with extensive filtering and joins.
In addition to the complex queries, Phoebe is also comfortable searching a number of platforms, using different methods to find what she needs.
One of these is a website called PubMed, which she uses daily. PubMed and other platforms use important patterns that make her job easier, including:
-
Simple and advanced input
-
Categorized lists
-
Popular searches
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
Phoebe's goal is to find relevant business insights before her competitors and present the results internally. She feverishly collects and organizes data from multiple sources including PubMed, ClinicalTrials, industry conferences, scientific publications, LinkedIn, company websites, and drug descriptions…
Forming a Hypothesis
Our hypothesis was that we could make Phoebe's process more efficient by aggregating and organizing her data sources, and making it accessible in a single platform.
Sources to inform our hypothesis:
-
Observation and interviews. These provide us with knowledge about Phoebe's existing workflow, tools, workarounds, habits, and goals.
-
Collected stories. These can be great, but we need to extract specific user problems and needs. One way is to use the 5-whys method. Another way is to find a way to test and measure each hypothesis with real users.
In this case, I quickly built a dashboard prototype. We developed the prototype in a Looker environment with live data, so we could measure usage. There is plenty to monitor, but some key questions to keep in mind:
-
Does this potential solution align with her current knowledge and expectations?
-
Do the features actually solve her current pain points?
Understanding Phoebe's Activity
Phoebe was happy with a spreadsheet of manually-curated data. This confirmed the data was relevant, but the process was not sustainable. We found a more efficient way to deliver data through Looker, which also allowed us to measure user activity.
This dashboard containing many data visualizations is the main page for Phoebe.
Here, Phoebe can see deep details about a specific company.
Phoebe cannot see this. This visualization allowed us to view physical locations of actual users, as well as user flows and actions.
This dashboard containing many data visualizations is the main page for Phoebe.
Phoebe spent very little time on the dashboard. While the Looker UI was good, the details she was looking for were not available in the main dashboard, only in the company detail pages, requiring her to drill individual companies. The ability to compare 2 companies was possible, but in a limited way. From the dashboard, Phoebe simply downloaded the data and sorted it quickly in Excel.
Observe and Measure
There are many methods for conducting user research. The most reliable way to learn about user pain points, is to observe (in compliance with GDPR) what they do. Interviews are a great way to learn about users, but asking "what's your problem?" doesn't provide reliable conclusions about real needs.
Prototyping Solutions for Phoebe
Since Phoebe liked the giant manually-curated spreadsheets we provided, our initial prototype gives her a similar table of relevant companies and ways to sort, filter, and explore the data. Feel free to play with the prototype, below. (desktop only)
Key Search Features for Phoebe
In addition to autocomplete, common filtering options are also provided. This lets Phoebe quickly narrow the list of companies.
An advanced user like Phoebe is able to leverage this level of depth to help hone in on exactly what she needs.
Phoebe is able to see why specific results are displayed, along with synonyms for each term.
In addition to autocomplete, common filtering options are also provided. This lets Phoebe quickly narrow the list of companies.
A Strategic Approach to Search
An off-the-shelf search feature wasn't a strategic fit. Here's why:
-
We combined existing search patterns familiar to Phoebe into a new solution, which supported mixed hierarchical structures.
-
The opportunity was in aligning with Phoebe’s existing workflow and acknowledging her continued use of other tools.
-
In addition to Phoebe, we needed to support less savvy personas, so we chose an approach that provided feedback by guiding users through search options.
Different point of view
Who else uses search?
As we were interviewing users like Phoebe, we ran into a related user problem, but we needed to develop another persona to explore their needs…
Meet Brian. He works with Phoebe, but his goals are different. She identifies business opportunities, but it's his job to sell the company's product.
Brian has a BA in Communication Management and 20 years experience in business development. He knows the lingo, but he's a sales guy. He wants to find companies who want his product, but he needs help knowing what to say, when reaches out. Unlike Phoebe, he doesn't want a giant excel file.
For him, the same platform looked quite different, as seen in this photo. (You can also switch to the Brian user in the clickable prototype above.)
"I want to know what companies in biopharma are working in oncology in my region to inform my sales outreach to beat my quota."
Phoebe used our solution. With the addition of Brian's use cases, the following companies leveraged our solution:
Takeaways
The most important part of the design process is to make sure it's for someone with a defined purpose, and to evaluate the efficiency and success of your solution with the intended audience.
Functions like search are critical for the user experience, which is most visible in a data discovery platform like Amplion's. This is not limited to front end UI aspects of the product. We worked with the back end developers to optimize product performance for these users.
Over the course of the project, the Brian persona became more important. He had the money to pay for a solution to his problem. As we delved deeper into his world, there were more related problems where we could help and evolve the solution.