Gorilla Experiment Builder (Draft)
A complete UX overhaul of gorilla.sc's flagship product
Role
Designer
Length
4 weeks
Type
Collaborative client project (SaaS)
Key Skills
Wireframing, usability testing, stakeholder management
What is the Gorilla Experiment Builder?
Gorilla.sc's flagship product is a web-based SaaS product primarily used by academic researchers to design and recruit participants for psychological research tasks. It's used by over 30,000 researchers across over 1000 universities.
Understanding the Problem
We reviewed 213 support tickets and conducted 14 usability tests with current users on the original site. Our findings highlighted some serious usability flaws with the product:
Left: Users struggled to find specific help and advice
Above: Users desired more control over the experiment tree
Left: We found a lot of unnecessary friction in the information architecture, such as unmanageably long lists
Problem Framing and Ideation
I created a persona to frame the issues at hand, defined a problem statement, took part in a design studio with the clients, and created a prioritisation matrix to help us manage our short time on the project effectively
Jasmine, 20
Undergraduate Psychology Student
Needs and goals: Wants to start using professional software to build experiments and needs a way in to using professional software. Wants software to be fast and efficient and not take away from valuable university time. Wants to access help quickly within software when hitting blockers, but would prefer a tool that requires minimal support.
Frustrations: Too much time spent learning new software. Steep learning curves on software can be intimidating. Not enough support and accessible information. Finds terminology a barrier to entry.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
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Jasmine needs to build and deploy experiments as quickly as possible so that she can begin collecting data for her research, however the builder navigation is unintuitive and stressful to use, causing Jasmine to spend too much time learning functionality and not enough time designing new experiments.