context
Quimbee is primarily a content-driven platform, offering thousands of case briefs, videos, courses, and other tools to help law students and practicing lawyers achieve their study goals. The goal of this project was to provide our largest user base (Study Aids) with a practical dashboard, with useful organizational tools to help manage and prioritize content.
goals
While there were several issues we faced from customer feedback and stakeholder requirements, it was important that we set clear goals and success metrics to keep us focused throughout the project.
workflow
Due to Quimbee's comprehensive design system, smaller projects at Quimbee would typically skip low fidelity and move straight into high. However, for this project, we felt it was important to move at a slower pace through the exploration phase to ensure that the correct decisions were being made, due to the importance of the feature to users.
User research
User research is the most important part of the exploration process and a key step in ensuring we deliver features users will actually want to use. We surveyed 400+ Quimbee users to discover pain points and what they needed to make the dashboard experience more useful/satisfying and categorized the feedback based on reoccurring themes.
evaluation
We used heatmaps and the user research feedback we had acquired to break down the existing dashboard to uncover weaknesses and items of high priority.
workflow
Our key takeaways from the initial user research and page breakdown gave us valuable insight into what areas we should focus on and what would satisfy our users.
Information architecture
It was important to establish a clear and well-structured dashboard experience for Quimbee users. We placed priority on commonly used features while offering intuitive navigation to help users explore the rest of the platform. It was also important for our key stakeholders to provide clear and simple access to companion products (Bar Review, CLE, etc), to help increase engagement and ultimately conversion.
wireframes
We held several rapid prototyping sessions with key stakeholders, using our research as a base for what we wanted to build. We landed on four concepts, and ultimately decided to take two concepts (C & D) through to high-fidelity to test with users.
high fidelity prototypes
Once we had working prototypes in place we tested the designs with users via Figma. The key difference between the designs was the style of navigation.
Our stakeholders preferred a design with all Quimbee products exposed in an accordion menu, while the design team felt that hiding the products in a dropdown allowed for a clean, distraction-free interface which we felt was more in line with our user needs.
We paid attention to verbal, written, and visual feedback to gain more insight into which design would meet their requirements, and what worked/what didn't.
feedback
Users overwhelmingly preferred the dropdown concept, which validated our decision from a design standpoint. Feedback general pointed out that the accordion-style menu felt cluttered and not useful. Users also told us that the content section was a huge improvement and would help them organize and personalize their experience.
Final product
The final result and overall success of the project led us to implement the sidebar across all internal content pages, and the creation of unique dashboard experiences for our other product lines. The separation of products allowed us to really hone in on use cases for our range of users. We created three new dashboard experiences for Study Aids, Bar Review & CLE users.
Final product
Utilizing icons, color and video thumbnails gives users an improved visual hierarchy, making it faster to scan and locate content. It also makes the dashboard more generally appealing.
Giving users the ability to pin/bookmark content allows users to customize their content layout. By adding content specific panels we improved the default dashboard organization.
Final product
Final product
