The Beginning

KISTERS is a German software company, based in Aachen with over 600 employees worldwide. The business unit water has a development team located in Germany, Spain, China, Australia, and China and has been developing software for the water management industry for the last 30 years. 

KISTERS Water has been developing web applications for the last decade or so. This is where I come into the picture. The web applications were being designed on the fly by product owners and developers. This approach, while ok at the start, had led to usability problems and an inconsistent product portfolio. I was hired to fix these problems, as well as establish a design process within the development process. 

When I first began, I was faced with several problems, in addition to those mentioned above. As the first designer within the company, there wasn’t an understanding of the design process or how to integrate design work into that of the developers. Design was often seen as a cost factor, and some developers saw my position as a threat to how they’d worked until that point. These problems needed to be solved as soon as possible for the design process to bring any value to KISTERS.

Step 1: Build trust, define a process.

Looking at the Norman Nielsen stages of corporate UX maturity, our starting point was somewhere between stages 1-2 (Hostility towards usability/developer centred user experience). To bring us forward to a point where great usability is integral to KISTERS products, I needed to start two jobs: building trust within the team and defining a first iteration of the design process. The first step in building trust involved showing the development team that their jobs would be made easier. I started with building a design system that could be used out of the box, both by myself as a sketch library and by the developers as dojo components. Building this design system had the immediate effect of improving the styling of our products and creating more consistency within the product portfolio, with a minimum of work for the developers. In addition to creating a design system, I made sure to collect feedback not only from product owners but also from developers from the start. This approach allowed me to implement an iterative design approach and showed the development team that design decisions also took the technical feasibility of the solution into consideration. Not only was I able to build up trust within the development team, but I was also able to quickly learn what effect design decisions would have on development time with our framework. 

Within the first 18 months, I had worked on over 30 projects, both redesigning new components and designing new products for a range of customers. I had run design workshops, defining new product. Any new projects went through an iterative design process, with a first definition using mockups, design prototypes using invision and concepts going through multiple iterations based on feedback from customers, products owners, and developers. Rather than being seen as an extra cost, my work was seen as a way to speed up the development process, get buy-in from customers, improve communication within the team and generally improve the quality of the products, both in terms of how they looked and the usability. The problem? Any design decisions were based on intuition, internal feedback and heuristics, not user testing. 

Step 2: Integrate user testing

Having formal user testing practises allows us to know with more certainty that any design decision we make improves the usability of the product. Although I had been using Invision prototypes for a while to test ideas internally, the next step in improving the design process was to run usability studies.

At this point, we were lucky enough to have an intern begin working with us. I worked closely with her to design our first usability studies. Our first study focused on a concept for a new graph component to be used in a range of mobile applications. We ran it through three iterations before settling on the final design to be implemented. Our goal in the study was to make the application so simple that users can quickly find their way around it, and easily complete their tasks with enjoyment. To achieve these goals, we tracked the following metrics:

• Satisfaction
• Effectiveness (Task completion rate, error rate, amount of clicks)
• Efficiency (time on task)

In addition, we also used the System Usability Scale as a baseline, having each test user answer 10 questions directly after finishing the test.

Over the three rounds of testing, we were able to find and better the main problems different workflows in the application, such as changing the time period shown or selecting analytics. Between the first and third concepts, the error rate and time on task decreased and task completion rate increased. In addition, the system usability score increased from 73.9 to 93.5, showing a clear improvement. 

Investing the time into running three rounds of usability testing measurably improved the product and has given us more security that we have designed the right solution, before it goes into development. The biggest effect for design at KISTERS was immediately visible once we presented the results internally. Showing that the results were measurable and clearly produce better usability in the product has resulted in direct buy-in from management and and given us legitimisation and a budget to run a number of user tests on other concepts and products. Running a smaller usability test and clearly communicating the results has had a large effect on the design process is implemented at KISTERS and has improved the usability of the products.

The Design Effect

Within the three years of working at KISTERS, I have been able to thoroughly integrate design into the development process, building up trust within the team. My work has directly resulted in faster development times, improved communication, both internally and with customers, and a general improvement in the quality of the products and customer projects. In addition, I have been able to begin integrating user testing into the design and development process, further improving the usability of our products.