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Challenge
Actuate Corporation is one of the industry leaders in Enterprise Reporting and Performance Management Applications. They provide scalable, reliable, flexible and high-performing reporting capabilities for every application in the enterprise.
For Actuate’s new product called BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools), Actuate decided to build both opensource and commerical version of the report development software based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform.
Business goal was to gain larger market share by providing powerful and easy to use report development tool without the additional complexities of the Eclipse, which was unfamiliar to the typical report developer.
Solution
As the user experience lead for the project, my responsibilities included: interaction design, user research, managing junior designers, and participate in the overall product strategy.
From the beginning of the project, I worked closely with the key stakeholders to understand the business goals, market environment, and the technology that will be used to build the product.
Because we were using Agile development process for the project, we had limited time for the user research. However, I did managed to conduct several interviews over the phone, few local customer site visits for a rapid contextual inquiry, analyze competitive products, review customer support data, and conduct online surveys to understand the user’s “want and needs” from the product. This upfront investment in user research became invaluable for the design and business strategy during the project.
Using the data gathered from the user research , I worked with my team to create the personas (target user profiles), user scenarios (use cases), and task workflows that were used to prototype the software and communicate the design with the stakeholders. Most of the prototypes were created in Visio, and imported into PowerPoint to make the prototype interactive (this proved to be a very popular way to communicate with the engineers and product managers). In addition, during the Actuate’s User Conference, I created several paper prototypes that were used to receive feedbacks during the participatory design workshop. Finally, more user feedbacks were collected using both onsite and remote usability testing using WebEx and Morae.
Some of the key discoveries from the user research and prototype feedback revealed that:
* Competing products required high learning curve, especially when users were trying to design the report layout
* Users wanted very minimal coding during the report development
* Users wanted to create more interactive web based reports
Based on the key discoveries, I came up with designs for the product that borrowed features from a popular WYSIWYG webpage design software to allow easier ways to design layout for web based reports, visual tool that provided most of the tasks that required coding in the past, and wizard like tool to quickly generate most popular type of reports.
View more Screenshots View Video Demo
Result
BIRT was selected as one of the top level Eclipse projects. It's also being used in many different organizations such as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where it was used for the Mars Rover management application, and received many positive reviews from the corporate customers, opensource community, analysts, and media. For example, InfoWorld described BIRT as the role model for developing opensource business intelligence applications.
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