BeeOdiversity:
thoughtbot recently worked with an innovative, Belgium-based company; BeeOdiversity. BeeOdiversity provide a range of software solutions that allow companies to monitor their impact on the biodiversity and wildlife around their sites. Their clients include large industrial or agricultural companies who may have multiple sites across Europe. Through the great work of their team, BeeOdiversity has experienced rapid growth and success to date. However, they began to experience some challeges related to scaling the app while maintaining a great user experience.
The challenge:
As companies experience rapid growth, they often roll out new features and functionality. The introduction of new functionality for scaling applicaitons is both necessary and beneficial. However, the user experience often suffers. New features are not necessarily mapped into the overall user journey, and thus the experience for the user can become disorganised, or less intuitive. BeeOdiversity experienced this challenge with their own rapid growth. Recognising this, they brought thoughtbot on board to conduct a Design Audit for them of their main monitoring application; BeeoImpact.
What is a Design Audit?:
A Design Audit, sometimes called a UX Audit actually is a systematic assessment of the user experience (UX) of a product, website, or application. The goal of a UX audit is to assess how well a digital product meets the needs and expectations of its users and to identify areas for improvement based on design best practices. This process usually takes around 10 to 20 days and involves a comprehensive analysis of various aspects of the user experience, including usability, accessibility, design, content, and overall user satisfaction.
The output of a UX Audit is usually a clear list of prioritised user experience issues that the team can then solve. By acting on this list of issues, companies can align their product to their customers and can create a product based on reliable data and best practices, rather than assumptions or conveniences. Having a better user experience gives companies a competitive advantage which leads to an increase in sales and many more delighted customers.
The Outcome:
Overall the BeeoImpact application was in a strong place. However, we were still able to find some recommendations to help the application become even stronger. The thoughtbot team structured each of our recommendations using the following formula:
- The Problem
- Why it is a problem
- A recommended solution
- The theory behind the solution (the “Why”)
- An example of the solution in practice.
We then prioritised each recommendation based on an “Impact” and “Effort” scale. A recommendation with a high impact and a low effort is something that will make a big difference and should be done right away. A recommendation with a low impact but a high effort involved to execute it is something that can probably wait.
Check out the full list of recommendations below. We even had time to put together a quick prototype to demonstrate how some of these recommendations could look in BeeOdiversity’s case!
Want to learn more about this project?:
Martin, the CTO at BeeOdiversity, recently joined some thoughtbotters on a Live Stream to discuss the UX audit project. Martin even implemented one of the high impact but low effort recommendations we came up with during the Audit live on the stream! It was fun for the team to see some of the recommendations already being implemented. We also got the chance to hear from Kirsten, thoughtbot’s Managing Director for the EWAA (Europe, Asia, West Africa) region, about what it’s like to engage with thoughtbot on a project, and how we came to work with BeeOdiversity.
You can view the full recording of the stream here!
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