Sovos Ongoing Notification Testing
The Challenge
Sovos grew by acquisition so they were working on integrating platforms to make one point of contact. One of the things they needed to integrate was a way to show their customers that there was work being done in the background. Often times this showed up as uploading and parsing many documents.
Research
I started with a rough draft to show people. I have noticed that if I have a jumping off point people are more likely to give feedback as to what I'm missing as opposed to if I ask them hypothetical questions.
When looking up examples from competitors, I found that a simple loading bar in the corner of the screen is what most companies were using at the time. I put this in front of many people, including the product and support staff who work with the customers on this product every day.
After taking in-depth notes, I created a persona for the type of person who is most often using this product. I like trying to build for the super-user, the person who will be in this product all the time. I created Phyllis, a 42 year old who manages the taxes for her company. She is working in this program every day by uploading and downloading these documents to make sure that all their sales are taxed properly depending no where they ship to. She needs something quick, sleek, and informative.
Initial Design
I quickly realized that having a progress bar in the corner of the page could quickly stack up if she were uploading and downloading many files at once. I also learned that being able to automatically download a report once a day would be very helpful, as many of the users are completing this action. Since I was already working in background processes, I added that to the docket.
Because many of our users are performing this action every day at their job, I made sure that everything had a "do not show again" option. I tried to reduce the footprint of the progress area, but also make sure the user knew if there was something they needed to take an action.
Conclusion
After a few meetings with the support and product teams, I found a way to reduce the footprint as well as being informative as possible. I created a smaller progress bar that lived at the bottom of the navigation panel that already existed. I used a color indicator to show the user if there were any actions needed. I pressure tested this in extremes seeing how it would look if there were 100 files being downloaded. I condensed them into one bar to show the progress of the entire batch and you could click the file manager to go to see the page in full with all the batch information.
Also, I added the automatic download option in the settings so that reports could be compiled and downloaded without needing to be present.
Future State
If I had more time to work on this, I would have done more workflow testing. I feel like I had a good grasp of what items needed to be added, but I hadn't hammered out the work flow for each of these processes. I also would have found a more accessible option to the alerts that would accommodate those who have low vision or colorblindness. My current thought is that I would add an icon into the notification dot if it were more time sensitive to fix.
