Portfolio project
Overview
In 2020 I joined the Novation Components team to identify and rectify a number of issues that were impacting significant numbers of users of Novation's utility application. I worked with the Novation Components team to assess Components’ design, identify pain points and put together a strategy to address major issues. Throughout 2020 and 2021 we released a number of incremental improvements to Components, slowly regaining users' trust and steadily improving Component's reputation. This case study focusses on the redesign of Novation's home page as an emblematic example of the improvements made to Components.
Context
Components is Novation's utility application for Novation’s hardware products that enables users to manage their sounds, patches and content as well as update their hardware to the latest firmware. Components had launched as an experimental utility in 2016, utilising a new Web-MIDI API, and had rapidly scaled from supporting a single product to supporting 17 different products across 7 different ranges within a short period of time with a very small team.
Home page confusion
The home page design consisted of a grid of 15 product logos that users needed to scan through and make a choice before proceeding. Through observation we found this placed a significant cognitive load on users, and similarities between logos mean that users often made the wrong selection, with no feedback provided that they had followed the wrong path. This was contributing to general negative discourse surrounding Components, with complaints around the experience regularly appearing on forums and user groups as well as a few 3rd parties developing and releasing alternatives to resolve pain points that users were experiencing.
Novation Components previous home page design. We found that the variety of type weight, size and treatment led to struggles for users when selecting the product they needed. We also found that similar logos were regularly mistaken for each other, such as the Launchkey Mini and Launchkey logos, in the top left and top centre positions above.
Supporting usability with visual choices
We hypothesised that if we could replace the home page with a page that dynamically show any connected products, we could ensure that users were presented with relevant options that would start to address the pain points we were observing on the home page. We started to ideate pages that presented connected products to users, and directed them through the steps they needed to update they products and begin their experience within Components on the right foot.
Our ideation eventually converged on a design for a minimal page that showed large images of connected products, which we found gave users confidence that they were taking the correct first steps. Throughout the process we commissioned 3D models and renders of every product Components supports, which enabled us to give a consistent and familiar look to Components, and provide us with assets that we could flexibly reuse throughout the rest of Components.
The final design for Components' new home page, showing 2 connected hardware products.
Beta testing discoveries
We were able to send an early version of the new home page to beta testers, and from initial reactions we found a number of testers were used to being able to use Components without a product connected. We learned that a small, but significant number of users preferred to prepare their content away from their hardware, before connecting their units and sending the content to the unit later on in their session. The new home page now made this much more difficult as users were now required a connected device before they could proceed.
We were able to address this feedback quickly by providing secondary access to Components through a drop down that enabled users to select their product from a list in order to access the app without connected hardware.
Release & impact
On release of the new home page, we saw significant improvements to connection rate - the proportion of users connecting hardware to Components - engagement with content and long term usage and retention, which gave us confidence that we had started to address users' frustrations with Components.
With the team, I put a strategy in place to identify, assess and ideate further solutions to pain points that Components users were experiencing, before handing the project off to a junior designer. To today I still provide mentorship to the team as well as support to designers working on the project.
Examples of further improvements we made to Components following the new home page, focussing on synth patch management and effects settings.