Climate Risk Navigator Re-Design
Process
ROLE - USER EXPERIENCE, USER INTERFACE, VISUAL DESIGNER
TOOLS - FIGMA
PROJECT DURATION - 16 WEEKS
The Climate Risk Navigator was the flagship product of Gro Intelligence, which had the most paid users of any of our applications. It originally was built by analysts using Python visualization tools, so it wasn’t the most visually appealing.
Our team’s mission was to reorganize & simplify the user experience, better enable specific use cases and update the user interface.
Known Areas for Improvement
There were some obvious changes we wanted to make to the overall user interface (to just give it a “facelift” for aesthetic reasons), but we had also recently updated our design system, so it was important to implement that as well.
We decided to do user research with both internal and external users of the application to see what overlap there was regarding user journeys.
Internal : We asked our sales team about how they demo the application to potential clients, and compared that to how our analysts actually use the web application.
External (Client facing): We interviewed our current paying users about how they used the application and what they liked and disliked about both the old site and the new prototype.
During both interviews we took notes and organized key takeaways from each, then compared to each other as well as to previous research done for the initial implementation. We created user journeys for each user type.
User Research &
Testing
Exploration
After reviewing the user research we created a site map based on the different user journeys and simplified the navigation by removing data tabs that were not needed. We then wireframed out the re-org of the entire application. We re-designed the user flow diagrams and added more contextual information to key areas (tool tips, about page, and narratives).
The finished designs included an improved tab-based navigation that was simpler yet more powerful than before, adding in a “Compare Regions” tab to compare data between whole regions without needing to open multiple browser tabs. We added a lot of functionality to the main map, and promoted it to a featured tab for easy access. We greatly enhanced the search capabilities, and consolidated some tabs to make the overall application more user friendly.
In addition, I personally concepted and designed an “About” page based on our user research results and our internal team’s feedback. This page intro’d new users to the application’s features at a high level, and provided them some sample use cases as well, before letting them dive straight into the tabs.
Final Design
LIVE: https://app.gro-intelligence.com/login
The business was specifically pleased with the About page I created, and our users voiced positive feedback regarding the user interface and interaction updates. They thought the application was easier to navigate with better context provided for various features.