Discovery is a advanced data search and visualisation tool for investigating data to the finest detail. Users can generate reports from the findings including relationships between selected findings. I was brought into the project to help solve some UX problems in the existing solution and design data visualisations.
Paul has been tasked with investigating a local traffic incidents. One witness claims on the day of the incident to have seen a SOI (subject of interest) at the location at 10AM, but another reported that the incident took place at 11:30AM.
Compare locations and times of witness reports for subjects of interest to validate the correct time of the incident to help the officers build a solid case against the SOI.
Needs to be able to view relevant entities by location, and a timeline based view is particularly important in this case as it will help to validate the correct time of the incident.
Needs to select & extract relevant SOIs, witness reports / statements etc. and build a report that validates the correct timeline and can be shared with the investigating officer.
Paul has a good rough timeline of when the incident took place he wants to be able to narrow down his data view to specifics he already has, and widen his search from there.
Analyst who regularly uses technical tools with big data visualisations and advanced search features. Wants to be able to narrow down search without being guided.
Searches are slow to execute so query accuracy is important. Not having the ability to tweak searches is painful. Used apps in the past that don’t provide feedback as queries execute which is very frustrating.
Sarah works for reputable local recruiter. Her employer provides background checks as a additional service to the recruitment process. She has been provided with details of a person being checked for a CTO position in a local tech company.
She’s got a dataset of matches to the subjects online activity in the last 5 years spanning professional and personal life. Sarah wants to check for any concerning incidents.
She needs to be able to view the contents of social media posts, other articles and any photo /video footage of interest. The ability to search for terms that relate to certain subjects is essential to find relevant data.
Needs to extract any articles / items of concern and build a report so this can be shared with the prospective employee. This will be reviewed by upper management before the position is secured.
Sarah has a list of terms she needs to search based on the type of job the subject is being recruited for. She wants to search internationally for any incidents as this person could have lived abroad.
Analyst who regularly uses technical tools with big data visualisations and advanced search features. Wants to be able to narrow down search without being guided.
Searches are slow to execute so query accuracy is important. Not having the ability to tweak searches is painful. Used apps in the past that don’t provide feedback as queries execute which is very frustrating.
There are some types of search that are key to making effective investigations. Searching for multiple search terms, parametric, time, location based search parameters will be key to identifying the correct results.
Organise the UI based on the technology and the related tasks so it’s easier for a user to locate the feature the user is looking for. There are 100+ plugins in the existing product making it difficult to find anything.
The current product is divided out into plugins that carry out individual tasks like add, edit, or delete items / subitems creating a lot of segregation and duplication of features / functionality.
Users have indicated more detailed and guided workflows for common tasks would be helpful. Tasks will be completed in a much more efficient manner and not require up front knowledge to understand.
Handling common tasks on scale (such as modifying user quotas) will remove a lot of existing repetition and provide users currently working in command line more incentive to shift to the web app.
