Database

Background

Client: Southern Poverty Law Center

My Role: UX, research

Viewport: Desktop, internal tool

Design Tool: Axure

The SPLC (Soutern Poverty Law Center) monitors hate groups and other extremists throughout the United States and expose their activities to the public, the media and law enforcment. Atlantic57, a creative and consutling agency now called Long Dash, partnered with the SPLC to provide recommendations and a proof concept for a new database because theirs called Dossier was being sunset. A team of experts, including myself, were assembled and flown to SPLC's headquarters in Atlanta to work on this project.

Opportunity

SPLC employees are unable to do their jobs well because Dossier has many inefficiencies such as navigation/wayfinding, which made it difficult to find information. The workflow wasn't clear so user created workarounds, many of which were outside of the database. In addition, the data visualization feature wasn't helpful and utilized too much prominent space. Plus, poor storage practices led to a loss of valuable information. Overall, the system wasn't user friendly. Since users weren't confident in Dossier, training new hires and retaining existing employees was difficult. 

Process

I started my research efforts by peforming a heuristic evaluation on the Dossier database to identify the problem areas. Since there were no analytics available on the system, we immediately began interviewing, in-person and remote, nearly two dozen users. As a former journalist, it was organic for me to lead the interviews with a list of questions I wrote down. Recording the sessions allowed me to go back listen to the discussions as it can be difficult to talk, write and comprehend what's being presented.

My research findings included a summery, issues, recommendations and verbatims. I covered the entire database such as the main page with search, data visualization, transferring data, security, data collection and tool integration. Collectively, employees used 55 tools to do their job! Many of them were unapproved by the company and could cause security risks. SPLC managed a lot of personally identifiable information and sensitive data.

I created profiles of each user-type by desk and documented their workflows of interacting with the Dossier database. Each desk contributes to the database which is used to generate a "Hate List" at the year's end. When I compared their existing process to my recommended version I exposed gaps where data could be lost, moved off-line interactions inside the database and reduced the number of steps in the approval process by automating parts that were previously managed manually by someone.   

With my research completed, I learned a lot about what users expected in a new database so I created sketches around these priorities. I annotated the sketches to show were content would life, how it would function and how users would flow between the system.

Although I received approval from stakeholders on the new concept, they still had many questions on how the features would work, look and be used. So the next set of deliverabes I created were wireframes to materialize the concept with more details. I presented the annotated wireframes to the same stakeholders as before but included the lead developer and visual designer to align expectations.

Result

I collaborated the visual designer to translated my wireframes into pixel perfect comps. We presented to stakeholders more than 53 screens including happy paths and error states. SPLC staff never worked with designers before so there were estatic to see there ideas go from me recording their thoughts, sketches, wirframes to fully completed designs. They no longer had to use their imagination, it was here!

The Southern Povery Law Center hired an outside agency to develop and implement the new database once Dossier was finally unplugged. I'm told the team was collaborating more efficiently, the database growing securely, training was less difficult and they loved the ability to customize their UI.