Research and Planning

Talking to key stateholders and potential users, the development team started by creating simple workflow sketches to see how traditional E-commerce worklfows could be adapted to our slightly more complex requirements.

Designing the Solution

Prior to embarking on this project, Esri UK had not explored the possibilities of E-Commerce as part of their business model. As a result, we recognized the need to implement effective UX strategies in order to ensure that the solution we were developing would cater to our specific user base. By leveraging various user experience techniques, we aimed to create an E-Commerce platform that would align seamlessly with the preferences and expectations of our customers.

User flows

As a product team, we worked hard to develop concise and targeted user flows within the app that specifically catered to the user's immediate needs. One major objective was to provide useful visual feedback during the editing process as to eliminate any misconceptions about the current status of any editing tasks.

Following several rounds of user feedback on visual mockups, we had successfully developed a number of compact and highly effective UI interactions. These features elegantly presented the editing rules to users in a concise and easily understandable manner. It received an overwhelmingly positive response from both stakeholders and users, making these micro-interactions a resounding success.

We also decided to test the idea of encouraging more confidence in capturing and editing spatial data within the application by allowing users to create business and topological rules aswell as user flow interactions such as a reliant undo and redo stack, something which was unavailable to our customer base previously.

Early sketches

The application goes beyond mere UI elements; it is a comprehensive app equipped with advanced geospatial editing capabilities. However, during the initial stages of development, we had to simplify and return to the fundamentals. We created early sketches and designed the user interface from scratch, taking into account both Desktop and Mobile solutions.

Conclusion

Throughout its life-cycle, Sweet for ArcGIS has grown from £0 to £2.5M ARR, this has been in part because, as development team we focussed on User Experience as a core principle of the product.

If I could do this project again, there are a few things I would have done differently:

1. Perform more heuristic evaluations of the app throughthe product lifecycle.

2. Advocate for more usability testing of the existing product and workflows before adding new features.

In hindsight, I think there were opportunities where we could have made the case for us to shift our focus to UX research. Instead, we continued to design and iterate upon new features.