User-centered development collaboration @MathWorks

This study was done as a part of my employment at MathWorks India. The main objective here was to understand the development teams expectations of the user interactions with the developed systems - Simulink Test and Simulink Design Verifier.

Overview

We discovered through usability testings that the algorithms and systems designed by our developers were not understood well by the our users, and therefore not used as intended. This research study was designed to understand the development teams perspective of the Simulink Test, Simulink Design Verifier and the components related to them. This was done as a primary research to improve components of Simulink Test and Simulink Design Verifier.

Objective of the study

Objectives of this study:

To better understand the development team’s expectations of user interactions.
To align the design team with the backend algorithms and development team insights.

My role as User Experience Designer

For this study I was focussed on collecting qualitative data, and was involved with the following tasks:

Contextual Interviews with Development team
Design workshops: Development team was asked to draw the UI components - in a way they see fit. This was inspired by Jake Knapp’s Design Sprint.
Low Fidelity Wireframing
Rail Road diagrams to map workflows

Data gathered

We later combined this data with customer data to design components of Simulink Test and Simulink Design verifier.

Feedback received

Rail road diagram of the existing flow was appreciated by my development team, it helped them visualize the painpoints and identify points to intervene
New UIs were appreciated for better usability as it reduced the previous bottlenecks.

As this was a project done as a part of my employment with MathWorks India, I will not be able to share any more information or pictures… But, do please feel free to reach out if you have any suggestions or feedback for the project. :)

FIN.