3decision® v2 – Discover the new UI
Last year, we set out a process to improve the user experience in 3decision. After years of gathering feedback and interviewing key users, we knew it was time to address the design and workflow flaws in the user interface. With the assistance of User Studio, an external UI/UX design company, we went through a deep refactoring and restyling of the front-end. The resulting work will be available in the next upcoming release of 3decision (3decision v2)!
In the initial version, 3decision was designed as a Dashboard-like application, where the users could combine widgets with different functionalities that interact with each other. This setup had some advantages: it gave a lot of flexibility, but it also caused some challenging problems:
Limited multi-structure comparison: The structural analysis was focused on a single “reference structure” and did not allow the user to freely work with a set of structures.
Navigation not adapted to new users: The user needed to know beforehand what actions/analysis a widget enabled to pick it up and bring it to the dashboard.
Lack of visual hierarchy: The hierarchy between the different parts of the dashboard was not clear. Advanced use cases were put together with basic daily-use actions, making it complex for new users to find what they needed.
These are just some of the issues that were confusing users, and thus hampering the adoption and full use of 3decision. With the new refactored front-end, we have addressed most of the problems that we detected. The main UI/UX improvements of 3decision v2 are:
Intuitively work with sets of structures. It is now straightforward to bring different sets of structures together to compare them. The user can create a list of structures and export them superposed in a couple of clicks. There is now a central working place that contains everything relevant for the user.
Instinctive navigation throughout the application. A navigation bar helps users understand where they are and where they can go within the different application layers. The different use-cases and analyses are now organized in a hierarchical fashion which subordinates more complex and less-frequently used actions.
Restyling of the user interface. The styles have been tidied up and unified to achieve a more modern and cleaner interface.
The short video in this article gives you a quick tour of the application, emphasizing the navigation, comparison between structures and the fancy new UI 😊
In the next two upcoming articles (3decision v2 – Discover the subpocket search and 3decision v2 – Discover the interaction search), we will introduce two main features, which we are very proud of, that will also be included in the 3decision v2 release. Stay tuned!