You've hopefully noticed a number of big improvements to the Money Dashboard interface over the past several months. As with any website or software product, we're constantly trying to improve the usability of our application. Many of these changes come as a direct response to feedback from you, our users, via the forum and customer support.
Additionally, we occasionally send out surveys to some of our users to solicit feedback on specific features or to help us prioritise our work according to your needs.
It's quite a journey, from concept to release. User feedback is regularly reviewed and incorporated into our Product Roadmap. From there, we evaluate and prioritise which areas to focus on first. After we've defined the business requirements for a piece of work, as the in-house User Experience Designer, my job is to translate those requirements into user-friendly designs. I'll sometimes do preliminary design concepts to communicate the direction I'm thinking of going to the rest of the business. Whenever possible, we present multiple design options to our users to further inform our understanding of user preferences and solicit additional feedback.
Once the concepts have been agreed, I use information architecture, interaction design and data visualisation best practices to flesh out the concept into an interactive prototype. This functions as the blueprint for all work moving forward and helps ensure that what is built meets the requirements. The prototype is then handed over to our developers who write the code for any new logic or functionality and apply any necessary styling. Finally, an extensive round of testing takes place to ensure the code is bug-free and the new designs work as expected before we release to our users.
This article is continued: Recent Improvements to the User Experience Pt. 2
by Elise Urbanek, User Experience Designer
