Case study 1

Oculid

Team: Me, 2 CEOs, 1 CTO, a Product Owner, a UX Researcher, 2 Data Scientists, a Front-end–, Back-end–, iOS–, and Android developer. 1 Marketing and 2 Sales persons.

My services: Design strategy, UX research, UI design, visual design, illustration, web design.

Products:

• Website: The marketing website to inform about the Oculid products.
• Platform: A cloud-based SaaS platform for UX and Market researchers to create eye tracking studies for mobile phones, and see the results in dashboards with different metrics and data visualisations.
• App: iOS & Android apps for test participants to run the eye tracking tests remotely on their mobile phones.

All products were in the MVP stage when I joined Oculid.

Problems:

Oculid faced several key challenges:

• Feature Gap: Customers missed essential features like sign-up, engaging data visualizations, and direct test result downloads.
• High Churn: Significant user drop-off occurred at multiple points in the user journey on both the web and mobile apps.
• Low Rates of Qualitative Data: High churn, combined with other usability issues, resulted in a low number of test participants uploading high-quality test results.
• Inconsistent Design: The products: website, web app, apps and social media channels, had a disjointed look and feel. The design system was incomplete, and standard design principles were not always consistently applied.

UX Research:

I collaborated with the junior UX Researcher to address these challenges, applying several UX research methodologies to understand better the root of the problems:

• Heuristic Analysis: I tested all Oculid products, identifying usability issues and areas for improvement.
• User Journey Mapping & Feature Flow Analysis: I mapped user journeys and created user flows of important features, noting pain points and moments of frustration.
• Usability Tests: Usability tests with target users from our network helped uncover issues and collect qualitative feedback.
• User Interviews: I conducted short interviews after the usability tests with test participants, asking follow-up questions to better understand their actions and frustrations during testing.
• Persona Profiles: I created persona profiles with the information gathered about our users so far, to consolidate insights and used to use them to create user-centric features.
• Competitor Analysis: I analysed competitors for inspiration and to ensure our designs aligned with current trends and design standards.

Solutions:

Insights from UX research were instrumental in ideating and designing effective solutions to user-reported problems:

• Churn Reduction
  
  • Onboarding Improvements: The web app’s onboarding was almost non-existent, relying too heavily on website guides and tutorials. I introduced onboarding elements such as modals, tooltips and hints. For the apps, I took the best of both worlds: the iOS & Android, and created a more unified style (they looked very differently), adding the parts that showed working best in UX research, adding clarity through clear UI hierarchy, creating new  illustrations that were more explanatory, modifying the UX copy with concise and accessible language, and using a consistent-responsive layout that adapts to different mobile sizes.
  • System Status Visibility: I added contextual, interactive hints within UI elements in a timely manner in the web platform to help users know what is going on at all times while using the platform.
  • Help & Documentation: The website’s help center was also updated with new guides and reorganized content for better clarity.
  • UX Writing: I established consistent wording conventions and used concise and clear microcopy for CTAs, tooltips, and system messages, using accessible language that users could easily understand.
  • Building Trust in Mobile Apps: To increase participant trust in the apps, appart of emplying clear micro-copy and improving the onboarding and instructions, I also highlighted data protection information, created an article about the data protection for test participants in the help center and restructured permissions to put them in the right place. Applying a more innovative overall style in the apps also helped making them feel more innovative and trustworthy.
• Feature Enhancements
  • Sign-Up Flow: I designed a sign-up flow which included a login and a password reset option.
  • New Analytics Dashboard Sections: I designed new dashboard sections, improving the analytics experience for users, and added options to download test results like videos, heatmaps, and raw data tables.
  • Falback landingpage: During usability tests, test participants got lost in the user flow. I created a landing landing page to redirect them to the right path.
• Design System Enhancement
  • Expansion of Design System: I improved the design system to reduce redundancy, create a shared language among all Oculid products and set clear rules and standards to manage the Oculid design at scale. I reorganised sections and included new essential ones like semantic colours, system feedback components,  layout and spacing, typography and type scale, etc.
  • Custom Icons & Illustrations: I created custom icons and illustrations to help unite the visual style among the products and improve clarity in onboarding and instructions.
  • Accessibility & Consistency: I applied standard design principles to resolved some UI issues and ensure consistency across elements.
  • Minimalist Design: I focused on highlighting important information while reducing cognitive load and visual clutter by applying a clean and minimalist design.
• Major Website Redesign:

  • Oculid’s website was poorly designed and did not align with the new look and feel of the other Oculid products. I led a comprehensive redesign, reworking the website’s Information Architecture to organise blocks of information in a clear manner, use storytelling techniques to describe the products benefits, applying the new design system  and creating a visually appealing design.

Impact

My design work led to significant improvements in the Oculid’s products, including:

• Sign up: The new sign-up process was praised by the team and showed no usability issues during testing sessions. It helped funnelling our users in different groups to better analyse their experience in the web app, while saving plenty of sales time, because they were previously responsible for manually creating new user accounts.
• Enhanced Product Perception: Applying the refined design system together with UX design principles made all Oculid products feel more intuitive, cohesive, and professional-looking. Feedback from customers and stakeholders emphasised the improvement in style and clarity in the redesigned products.
• Reduced Drop-Off Rates: Clearer onboarding and instructions reduced user drop-off rates by 35%, and improved participant posture while running the test—which is essential for reliable eye-tracking results—by 20%.
• Increased data quality rates: A better participant posture was directly correlated with better data quality, the high quality data rate increase by 20%.
• Resolved Usability Issues: Of the 120 usability issues identified, over 65% were successfully resolved through iterative usability testing and design improvements.
• Company Acquisition: Oculid’s strong design and usability were pivotal in its successful acquisition by Tobii, the global leader in eye tracking technologies.
• Career Advancement: My contributions to Oculid’s success led to a promotion offer, underscoring the trust and recognition from my team.
• Positive Reception of Website Redesign: The website redesign was well received by both the team and customers. The improved storytelling, clearer structure, and modernised look increased user engagement and greatly influenced the positive perception of the brand.

Conclussions

By addressing critical issues and delivering effective design solutions, I played a significant role in improving Oculid’s user experience, increasing user satisfaction, and ultimately contributing to the company’s successful acquisition.

Case study 2

Tobii UX Explore

Tobii UX Explore was the continuation of Oculid under Tobii. As the only Designer for Tobii UX Explore, I was instrumental in transitioning all designs to Tobii and later scaling the product to meet Tobii’s standards for design quality and usability.

Under Tobii, the tool became primarily targeted at UX Researchers, while market research customers were directed to other specialized Tobii products like Sticky.

I adopted Tobii’s Design System to redesign all screens. I took the chance to solve long known usability issues.

Case study 3

Sticky

Sticky is a tool for conducting eye-tracking and emotion studies for Market Researchers on desktops and mobiles.

I was assigned to redesign the AOI editor and introduce a new feature: Dynamic AOIs.

AOI stands for “Areas of Interest”, and is one of the most powerful metrics in Eye-tracking. Researchers can define areas on an image or a video and measure the attention it gets by the users.

I redesigned the AOI Editor and the new “Dynamic AOIs” feature. This feature leveraged a new “object tracker” AI model, enabling AOIs to move dynamically with objects in videos, wich was a great advancement for the customers, because they had to draw the AOIs in videos in frames one by one before, since there were only static AOIs.

Designing this feature presented many challenges due to technical constraints with the AI model. I collaborated closely with a data scientist and front-end developer to understand the complexities and deliver the best possible solution.

In the end, the result was very well-received, earning praise from the team and satisfaction from customers.

Glasses Explore

This is the latest cloud-based SaaS tool developed by Tobii for conducting behavioral, market, and UX research studies.

I wasn’t an integral part of this team, but I was a part of the Tobii’s design team, were we often talked about Glasses Explore, and I helped with analysing and giving expert review on the product, and I had various rounds of  feedback with the Glasses Explore designers during usability tests.

Conclusions

Working for Oculid and a leading company like Tobii, focused on cutting-edge technologies and user research, strongly strengthened my foundation in UX research and usability. Conducting plenty of eye tracking tests myself, sharpened my intuition for user attention, helping me to better understand what usually captures the user’s attention in an interface, which is a really practical skill for a product and UX designer to have!

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