Marketplace

Product UX/UI Design Lead

Company: Seerist
In Collaboration with: Product Manager, Development Team

Context

Seerist aimed to launch a new "Marketplace" feature, and my role was to design solutions for these key functionalities:

• View Marketplace

• Subscribe to Notifications for specific Marketplace Queries

• Add a Marketplace Query to their Saved Search Queries

• Access their Saved Marketplace Queries

• Publish a Saved Search Query to the Marketplace

During this project, I focused on addressing significant usability challenges in the Seerist platform, which had been developed without a consistent design system or adherence to key UX heuristics, to ensure a cohesive and intuitive user experience.

Challenges

Addressing Design Inconsistencies

Challenge: The product exhibited inconsistencies in iconography and language, resulting in user confusion.

Solution: I conducted a detailed UX heuristic audit and developed guidelines to standardize usage across the platform. I also worked closely with the Product Manager to implement these changes, improving design coherence and delivering a more unified and refined user experience.

Improving Color Utilization for Navigation

Challenge: The existing product lacked a strategic use of color to enhance user navigation.

Solution: I implemented Seerist's primary Kelly Green for key navigation elements and feedback indicators. I conducted internal reviews and gathered user feedback to refine the color application, ensuring it improved navigation clarity while maintaining a balanced, non-overwhelming interface.

Managing Product Input on Design Decisions

Challenge: The product team frequently presented design requirements that conflicted with established UX heuristics and user experience best practices.

Solution: I developed design solutions that balanced the product team’s requirements with a user-centered approach. I facilitated open communication and provided guidance on UX principles and heuristics to inform design decisions, ensuring alignment.

Requirements from Product Manager

Requirements for Saving to Marketplace:

1. Requires marketplace user group setup. This will be limited to a handful of people from the intel/product team.

2. On the main Search pane, within the Saved queries tab, if a user is assigned to the marketplace user group they will have access to an additional button as per the screenshot below. The users with these permissions will be able to build a search that can then be saved to the marketplace using a combination of the keyword builder and all facets, as usual.

3. Select from our marketplace tab will be available for marketplace and regular permission users.

4. Marketplace permission user builds a search using all the available facets and then hits save to marketplace.

5. A modal window appears with a table similar to the one that displays alerts/tripwires in new alerts.

   • User can: search marketplace.

   • Filter by type / countries / cities

   • Sort Created most recent / oldest

   • Table headers: Type / Name / Description / Created / Countries / Cities

   • Type: can be any existing type in future but for now this will only be Saved searches

   • Name: Taken from the search facet

   • Description (editable): As a default empty but an editable free text box that can hold up to 500 characters. When the user first sees this, they can see Edit field. When they hover over it an edit pen icon appears. Clicking on that the field becomes editable. Clicking away from the field saves the text.

   • Created: Takes creation date from when the user hit save to marketplace

   • Countries / Cities: Shows a dropdown of all geographies.

   • Question: What should we do about ALL DATA / MAP EXTENT options?

   Each line item can be edited, copied, deleted.

   As a default, the table shows the most recent saved searches on top.

Requirements for Selecting from Marketplace by COPY:

Both regular user and marketplace permission user will have access to Copy Search from Marketplace within the marketplace UI.

• Clicking on marketplace bubble opens a modal window. Modal window displays all alerts that have been saved by users with marketplace permissions. This is the same exact marketplace modal use within Notifications.

Tooltip displays: We created a search marketplace that we at Seerist believe you may find useful, regularly adding new searches to help you track major developments. Just click the plus icon in “Add to Saved Queries” to save them into your own saved search list when needed. Check regularly to see what we have addd.

• User selects a search and adds it to user’s saved search list from this table:

• Clicking the plus icon in ‘Add to Saved Queries’ column the user can add any search into their own saved query list.

• When user chooses ‘Add’, , the saved search is created into the user's saved searches as '[Title] Copy'. The user can review the metadata associated with the search, modify and save as, set notifications. [mockup shows Copy [Tittle]]

• To improve the user experience, users can add Marketplace searches from the Alerts pane. Clicking MARKETPLACE will open the same modal window.

Requirements for Selecting from the Marketplace by SUBSCRIBE:

Both regular user and marketplace permission user will have access to SELECT FROM OUR MARKETPLACE button.

After opening modal window, user can select “Subscribe to Saved Query” by clicking the Subscribe icon in the Subscribe column of the saved search (2) marketplace.

Clicking the play button allows the user to ‘Subscribe’.

• When user chooses ‘Subscribe’, the saved search is created into the user's saved searches as ‘[Title] Subscribed'. The user cannot modify and save the search, but can 'save as’ a new search.

• When user subscribes to a search, the saved search automatically updates to reflect any improvements or changes made by a marketplace user.

First Iteration

Feedback from Product Manager

Organize the drop downs into a tab navigation design as found in Search Events.

Response from UX/UI and Product Design Lead

This creates the need for users to make more clicks to accomplish their goals, when each item of the tab navigation would only have one dropdown.

Feedback from UX/UI and Product Design Lead

I communicated that hiding Save Search and Save Search as within Saved Queries was confusing. If the user moved down through Search to apply an Event and/or Date Range, it wasn’t intuitive for them to need to go backwards into Saved Queries to Save the Search.

Response from Head of User Experience

The Head of User Experience provided a design solution that would move Save Query and Clear filters to the bottom of Search.

Final Iteration for MVP