Roxhill Media
“A new-look Roxhill Database”
The problem
Roxhill are in a great position, they have a large portion of the market and exceptionally high renewal rates, however their platform was launched over 7 years ago.
Not only had the UI of the platform become dated, but the technology behind it meant that any iterations to the platform took much longer than they should.
This meant any problems I highlighted with the platform were a pain to fix.
As well as improving the basic usability of the application we had plenty of great ideas we wanted to launch but because of the current platform development we were not in a position to do so.
Goal
Launch a new design system
Improve usability and meet WCAG 2.1 guidelines
Include any improvements functionality, prioritised by low effort / high impact.
My role
As the Lead Product Designer at Roxhill, all areas of design and research were my responsibility. We were also without a product owner, so as often the case within a smaller team some of those responsibilities fell into my lap too. Thankfully we had a developer 😅.
Process
I undertook a UX review of the platform, highlighting areas of the database that I felt caused confusion to the user as well as outlining areas of the site that failed accessibility.
I validated my initial findings by;
Speaking to internal users
At Roxhill we are blessed to have PR users who use Roxhill and have used other competitors.
Speaking to account managers
Our account managers have close relationships with their users and often receive feedback about the database, so I set up calls with the client team to get their thoughts on the database and replay any user feedback they had received previously.
Studied session replays
We have fullstory set up on Roxhill which is really great for replaying sessions and understanding how users are using our site. This allowed me to go directly to areas of the site I thought users may be struggling and replay sessions to validate my theories.
Of course, speak to users
At Roxhill, other than our account manager relationships, there has been no user research previously. I reached out to some users asking if they would be interested in having a chat over Microsoft Teams.
It can be hard to get hold of users, but if you can, I think it is invaluable.
The sessions were open, I asked about the user’s experience using Roxhill. I of course has areas I wanted to ask them about, but I wanted them to lead with frustrations or pain points they may have had.
The sessions were great, they validated a lot of what I had discovered myself, but also brought up some other quirks about the system I and my colleagues were unaware of.
Getting to work
The new look Roxhill would be a a new look & feel with the new style and components from the design system, meaning most functionality will be in the same place and work the same way. This meant we could get the platform in a good shape before we made larger scale changes to the application.
I began working on new a new UI that would become our new look Roxhill and our new design system, Serengeti.
Roxhill had undergone a slight rebrand so this was an important factor when creating the new UI that would become the core of our design system going forward.
I got to work coming up with a variation of ideas of how some of our key pages could look.
The designs were reviewed internally. 2 preferred options were refined before I got some feedback from users to gauge their impression. Users all seemed to prefer the same design which was echoed by myself and my colleagues.
I started to redesign the remaining pages of the platform, building our new design system along the way.
I have found developing a design system this way is a really efficient way of doing it, rather than building a design system and then designing pages from it, as it meant I can make sure components work together well and then confirm them in my library.
As previously mentioned, I’d recruited users to be a part of our BETA Community.
Once we were ready to begin testing the new platform, I invited users from the community to test.
In our initial phase we had 8 users test the BETA platform and provide feedback over Microsoft Teams. This allowed us to gather further feedback on the UI changes as well as testing of some new features we had developed.
The feedback was really helpful, as expected some bugs were raised but the feedback was positive.
Before going live we had a second phase of BETA testing.
When a user logged in to our live platform, they were invited to test our BETA site, with a form provided should they want to provide feedback or raise a bug.
As expected with unmoderated testing the amount of feedback compared to the amount of users was small, but were were able to monitor sessions via fullstory to get a feel for how it was being used.