UX PORTFOLIO


Parimala Hariprasad
I'm Parimala Hariprasad, a Senior UX Architect and User Researcher. 

Know more about me on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Medium. Want to know what I am working on recently? Write to me at parimala[.]shankaraiah[@]gmail[.]com. 


UX Portfolio 
Here are a few projects I have worked on:

Project: Online Real Estate Home Page
A top Indian online real estate website catering to renting, buying and selling property online
Problem Statement
The online website faced one major problem – their users did not subscribe to premium services on the website, leading to huge loss of revenues
My Role
I was asked to review the home page design and identify the reasons for users not opting for premium services although a large percentage of users had rented, bought or sold multiple properties on the website.

How did I start?
I started this project by reviewing the existing website and potential user flows. I also reviewed the inputs received by the website team which included both positive and negative feedback about their experiences on their support distribution list. 
Goal
Evaluate Home Page of XYZ website for most noticeable features using Five Second Test
Why Five Seconds Test?

Five Seconds Home Page Design test was targeted towards capturing features that user notices the most in five seconds time. Note that since this is a 'View-Only' test, I didn't let participants to drill down into pages like Dashboard(not logged in), Listings Pages and others. Instead, I captured only those features/UI elements which were on the home page. 
The outcome of the Five Seconds Test

1. Home Page Feature
Key Findings

J Search, Advertisements, Buy, Rent and Logo were noticed by a majority of participants
L The most important ‘POST’ feature was noticed only once
L Global Search was not noticed even by a single user
L Few features such as Sell were noticed by participants although they were not part of the website
Recommendations
1. Post feature must be the first tabs on the website or have a dedicated area on the home page. It should be clearly visible to the user. Magic Bricks website makes Post feature so prominent that people will be interested to explore that feature before heading to look at any other feature
2. Global search is hardly visible to participants. This search box must be made clearly visible to participants 


2. Navigation Panel

Key Findings
J Properties, Projects and Location tab were noticed by many participants
J Locations header at the tab was spotted easily by most participants. Many even highlighted that the currently selected city is Bangalore
L Post tab was the least noticed tab on the website. Only 1 out of 23 participants noticed this tab. A few participants who had visited XYZ before also failed to notice/highlight this tab  

Recommendations
1. The post tab must have better placement on the website. This is already highlighted in Complete Feature List section above
2. Tabs must be displayed in larger fonts and must be highlighted with good background
3. Tab which is currently open must be highlighted in a different color to inform the user of where he is on the website at that point in time (Bread crumbs feature might help too)
4. Tabs like Services, Home Loan take participants to the same page. This can be clubbed into a single tab ‘Services’ and displayed with sub-menus for participants
5. For consistency, new pages must open in new windows/tabs. Few tabs open in new windows while tabs like services open in current window. In such cases, users must be able to navigate to XYZ home page easily. If users are confused on new pages, there are very little chances of them returning to XYZ home page which might lead to potential revenue loss

3. Least noticed features


Key Findings
J The following features have received the highest score, because of its color and placement:                                    • Search
• Rent
• Buy
L Post is least noticed feature because of its placement
L Map Search and Careers features were noticed by 1 participant out of 32 participants respectively
L Free Site Visit is a special benefit for XYZ users. However, this was noticed only once
Recommendations
1. Post feature can be made more prominent on the website

The Challenges faced









The Solution Proposal
The following solution was identified:
1. Re-design the home page to embed premium features right on the home page. This included:
üPost Ad
üBecome a Premium Member
üBuy services
2. Perform a competitor analysis with two nearest competitors and guage value for money

NOTE: This did require new design and development from XYZ team. With this report as inputs, they used their design agency to re-design the website.

Impact

NOTE:  Exact Figures / Survey Results were not shared by XYZ. They came back for more Competitive Analysis and other User Research projects a few months later. 

Reflection
Why was this important to Business?
1. The business needed a way to increase customer satisfaction
2. The business wanted more users to sign up as premium customers
3. The website needed to reflect the business goals

Why was this important to users?
1. An easy and simple approach to becoming premium members needed them to understand the price factor as well as the benefits involved.
2. They wanted to escape the brokerage fees, which motivated them to opt for premium membership

_END_OF_PROJECT_ 1_ 


       Project: Musically Yours
This is a live music streaming app for India Classical Music teachers and students
Problem Statement
When I first used this mobile app, I wondered what could be wrong with selling this product in the market? Why does the founder want to invest in reviewing Business Design? And so forth.
The Business team at this organization wanted to create shared value:
Business value: Identifies the new business segment which streams the music to smartphones (channel) on mobile network and internet (Wifi)
Social value: Promoting the classical music genre, sabhas, kutcheris, supporting the artists, and giving debut artist/band a platform.
My Role
My architect and I worked together along with 4 field study practitioners on this project. I contributed to the business side of the project while the rest worked on the field using the live music app in different parts of Bangalore, Mysore and all places in between these two cities. We also ran a Business Review project on this mobile app
Business Model Review

Value Graph
Musically Yours vs other online streaming services for Indian Classical Music genre

Challenges







Business Analysis and Recommendations

Impact




Reflection
Why was this important to Business?
Business Analysis was a new ask for a startup. It was critical because the founders wanted to know if this app will work well in the market in the large scheme of things as both founders were from development background
Why was this important to users?
Users of this app were introduced to Indian classical music on their fingertips.


_END_OF_PROJECT_ 2_