Role
Product Consultant
Client
Gaian Solutions
Team Size
6
Duration
6 Months
Designed and managed a PaaS which helps broadcasters in visualising data, engagements hierarchially and connections between them. From the source of every action take by a user to the end target sengment of users everything is visually connected in a universe for your analysis.
The product has real time omni-channel engagement capability which is triggered dynamically based on contextual actions of the user.
Analysts
Product & Project Managers
01
Discovery & Definition
For a product which offers an end to end solution like this, what all are the features that are important? While i was awre who the target segments (broadcasters), it was important to understand the user and actions that would be taken on this product. Considering the complexity, the knowledge and exercise that designer has to do to understand the whole process has become a primary problem. Also, how will the engineering team achieve such dynamic capabilities of Data Lake, which is both quick and beautiful?
Gaian Solutions is exclusively tied with broadcasters in USA and India. Hence the serviceable scope is narrowed out, but it was important to know who uses this product in these organizations. I performed a discovery to understand how technically challenged or comfortable the users are. As i have limited access to interview the users as a consultant, i performed interviews with internal Business Analysts and Product Managers (of other products), who has clear understanding on customer insights.
I had discovered that most of the users for collaborating with Gaian Solutions are analysts or productproject managers from client companies, to integrate with their internal systems. Hence the complexity of the product should have very small learning curve to the users.
After understanding the technical capabilities we proceeded to look for libraries in D3 that would help us achieve the interactive visualisations. We experimented with multiple libraries that helps in hierarchial mapping of data and also create dynamic graphs at the same time. Ability to customise the canvas and generate pop-ups as required.
With an efforts of almost 45 days and intense brainstorming, i was able to map the d3 library's capabilities to a usable workflow and intuitive user experience. We would have to leverage the clusters of different categories and connect them instead of a completely scattered universe.
The hierarchy goes as follows:
Data Ingestion > Entities (Datasets) > Contexts/Conditions > Queries (To add any information before engaging user) > Engagement/Campaign > Experience/Visualisation/Design > Segments
In this journey, i have realised we could load other products that are being built as part of solutions being provided by Gaian Solutions for its customers. For example, DESIGNER to design the experience which end users/consumers receive if they meet the context.Users should be able to immediately create a design/ad which they want to publish as part of an engagement in the universe itself. We explored such options of integrating multiple proudcts to promote and effectively utilise their capabilities.
02
Experience Design
By now you might have understood the more you about this product, the more complex it is. Now, for users to take them through this without tough efforts, how intuitively can you design the product?
First, i have assigmed different colors and cluster space in the universe to different clusters as mentioned in the hierarchy. Then based on the userflow defined earlier, i have created components that would be used during multiple stages of user interactions.
03
Product Roadmap
While designing the experience of data lake's complete universe, i have also been documenting the user stories to handover it to engineering team with every interaction and detail. I have created tasks that needs to be prioritised in order to achieve the most ambitious and complicated flows in the journey. I have created a roadmap to launch the MVP by November 2022, and team are very optimistic about being on track without any major concerns.
