Insights pie charts

One of the first projects I was given at Abstract was to help redesign the Insights feature. User studies, consisting of CI designers, had concluded that the pie charts were confusing, and for one user, even offensive. The design team created education modals and soon asked my help to refine the copy.

Research identified the problem

As an organization that values research, the first task was to wade through our findings and figure out exactly what the problem space looked like. I found that one of the issues was the lack of clarity of what the pies represented and what to do with them.

My starting point

The modules that our designers were creating were too crowded to be easily understood. Some of this text needed to move or be removed.

Suggestions

My initial suggestions were to create a progressive series of modules that could contain details in smaller blocks. Our engineering team didn’t have the bandwidth to expand the project to that degree.

Iteration

My next iteration kept all the content on one module, but organized it using information hierarchy and bullet points. With this version, I was able to visually demonstrate how it was too much information for such a small space.

Reception

The reception from stakeholders were overwhelmingly positive. As you can see below, we opted to do another round of testing to check our direction.

Final module

In the final module we moved the welcome message to its own “toast”, leaving room for more white space around our messaging. The information was simplified again and this version was shipped.

Conclusion

This project solidifies the importance of concise copy and the importance of research based iteration. Each series of user tests gave me greater insight to the problem space, allowing me to both adjust my copy to fit the project, but also justifying rescaling the project to fit the need of the user.

In the end, this was short lived and we redesigned how data was presented in the product. Design is never finished - just shipped.