Global Gas Rating Platform

Overview

Platts 'Global Gas Platform' provides the North American and European gas markets, with critical market data, price assessments, industry news and analysis to meet the business needs of traders, risk managers and market analysts.

Challenge

The platform had recently gone through a visual redesign which had yielded marginal improvement in performance, which according to user feedback, was critically poor. I was brought in to review the platform and improve the user experience.

Research

My first thought was to find out from the user how, what for, how, where and when they used the platform. Using existing platform data and analytics to make some early assumptions. What are the drop off points, which pages have the highest journey termination, what functions have the highest number of complaints.

Ethnographic Survey

Documenting user behaviour by observing them in their usual environment.

Ethnographic Survey Output

Content Audit

Auditing content on the current platform so every task, feature and page on the platform is documented and accounted for.

Personas

Proto-personas to distinguish user types based on common goals.

Card Sorting Workshop

Reverse Card Sorting

Coordinated a card sorting workshop - we had representation from external users in one group and internal user in a different group so as to measure how the different user groups perceive the data and taxonomy on the platform.

Redesigned the site structure to fit the user's expectation. We then conducted a reverse card sort with another group to validate the new taxonomy and structure.

Task Scoring Workshop

Task scoring exercise helps us gauge the value of tasks on the platform. The tasks are scored by users vs the business to give insights into what the business sees as a priority vs what actual users sees as a priority.

Proposed Solution

A prototype was built rapidly in Axure to present to the team and to end users.

Wireframes

Test Model

Built the navigation into a test model. We gave tasks to users could see if they could fulfil tasks given specific scenarios.

The re-designed navigation for was tested with users which resulted in improved navigation efficiency. User were able to complete the user journey 70.9% of the time as against 29.41% from the existing menu system.

Outcome