As a part of a system wide redesign of Sardius’s platforms I worked on one the most interactive spaces of online events, the sidebar chat. Along the way we had to made some compromises and re evaluate the implementation plan and timeline. This is a project I’m really proud and living proof that things are not always as simple as they might look.
I was tasked with the redesign of the chat feature for Sardius's online events. As part of a larger platform redesign effort, the chat represented a significant opportunity to improve the interactive experience for attendees. Throughout the process, I relied on user research, competitive analysis, and collaboration with developers to guide my decisions. Despite encountering some challenges along the way, I am proud of the final result and believe it demonstrates my growth as a product designer. The redesigned chat serves as a cornerstone for future improvements to the platform, and I am excited to see it in action during live events.
Research plan, interviews, evaluating past research, competitive analysis, organizing and sharing the findings, exploring different solutions, delivering a high fidelity prototype, making usability testing, dev handoff and design QA. Pretty much took part in very step of this redesign project with help of the Product Owner, Project Managers and of course the Developers.
I'm working on a UX case study regarding the redesign of the chat for online events. Can you help me with the first paragraph? I want it to mention how a research plan was laid out to include user interviews, competitive analysis, and after talking with devs the need to make it in different phases. If it's concise but thorough would be awesome. But also kinda informal and cool about it.
We kicked off the redesign with a research plan that aimed to understand the needs and wants of our users. We chatted with real people, scoped out the competition, and after huddling with the dev team, we realized that a phased approach was the way to go. So, we broke down the redesign into manageable chunks, making sure that every phase worked correctly with the rest of the platform and making bugs easier to catch and fix.
The next paragraph is about the findings. The size was mentioned a lot of time to be too big. Some people didn’t love how it looked on mobile. The research didn’t show anyone that hated it, but that it did felt outdated.
The research phase of the project relied heavily on input from our internal user base, including project managers, to gain insights into their experiences and pain points. We also conducted an extensive review of past debriefs and analyzed every mention of the chat sidebar. This information was cataloged as either positive or negative and used to create a list of areas for improvement. By taking a data-driven approach and considering the perspectives of both our internal and external users, we were able to identify key areas for enhancement and prioritize our efforts accordingly.
The size was mentioned a lot of time to be too big. Some people didn’t love how it looked on mobile. The research didn’t show anyone that hated it, but that it did felt outdated.
The findings from our research showed that the size of the chat sidebar was a common issue among users, with many feeling that it was too large. Additionally, the chat's appearance on mobile devices was a point of frustration for some users. Although no one expressed outright dislike for the chat, it was clear that the design felt outdated. These insights were used to inform our redesign strategy and prioritize the areas that would have the biggest impact for our users.
Next was working on the Information architecture. See, besides the general chat on the sidebar people can access a Q&A tab, Polls, Direct messages, video rooms, see the schedule of the event, have an iframe embedeed, and donate to the event. after getting thos first findings we worked on arranging them in the way that made the most sense for most people.
Based on our research findings, we focused on improving the information architecture of the chat sidebar, ensuring that its features were arranged in a way that made the most sense for our users. The chat included a range of functionality, including a Q&A tab, polls, direct messages, video rooms, access to the event schedule, an iframe embed, and the ability to donate to the event. Our goal was to create a user-friendly and intuitive layout that made it easy for people to access and use all of these features.