Attachment System
LlamaZOO Interactive
2021
Summary
The LlamaZOO platform visualizes geospatial, engineering, and IIoT data in context for actionable Spatial Business Intelligence. The attachment system allows our clients to improve collaboration and presentations by linking valuable data to an object or location.
To paint a picture, Imagine you’re on your desktop or VR flying around a 3D digital forest and you come across an interactive Pin over a lake. You click on the pin, and an info panel pops up sharing a write up about this lake, with attachments of some photos, the latest report on water quality testing, and maybe an audio clip of someone describing the area. All these attachments make the data more rich, and informative for collaboration, documentation and presentation purposes.
My Involvement
Collaborate with Product Owner to define the feature and requirements, design, testing and development hand-off.
Key considerations I lead were:
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Permissions
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Viewer vs Editor of the data
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Types of data
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How/where to attach and all the designs
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UX metrics
Target Users
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Admin/Contributor
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Viewers / Presentation attendees
Timeline
3 weeks part-time
Team
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Myself as lead UX/UI
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Product Owner
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Front-end and backend developers
Tools
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Sketch
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Invision
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Figma
STAGE 1
Understand
The research for this project was conducted by the Product Owner at LlamaZOO with input from the development team and myself.
Problems we are trying to solve include:
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Communicating in ways that are effective to various audiences (multiple levels of familiarity and expertise)
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Using various forms of communication and content (value from all content/data creation efforts)
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Allowing non-GIS people to contribute to the conversation
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Enabling additional forms of collaboration and storing of information relevant to an object, marker or pin
STAGE 2
Research
To begin this project, I read through the requirements of the brief, then began exploring how other existing products handle attachments. I looked at various products including Google Earth, Word, dropbox.
STAGE 3
Analyize
We knew this was a feature we were going to implement, but it was my challenge to choose a path forward. I sketched out a few options from direct attaching to an info panel, to a more detailed and customizable attachment dialog.
My approach was to begin with identifying existing features in the application where attachments could be added and expand from there.
STAGE 4
Prototype
The screen flow went through multiple versions. Initially, we thought to add attachments only to existing objects/markers, but this would have caused other discoverability issues. Ultimately we landed on a reusable attachment dialog option to allow for flexibility.
Once I’ve generally got a flow down, I run it by one of the developers on our team to get their input. This helps catch any missed use cases, potential issues, or better design ideas.
To validate the design, I tested the design on a colleague on the sales team. I gave her a list of tasks to complete and observed her clicking around the prototype. She completed the tasks with ease.
STAGE 5
Test
Existing clients who have received this feature have easily added attachments. They are excited about the new opportunities this brings to future presentations.
Some improvements requested include a solution for slow internet connection. We decided to show preview and only download on request. User can pre-download larger data types before a presentation for a seamless experience.
Success metrics have been documented, but analytics to gather data has not been implemented as of the date I wrote this.