How I Designed an Import Tool That Boosted Efficiency by 5.7x

2020, Genemod: self-serve import tool

 
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Problem: Customers (life-scientists) have no easy way to migrate their inventory from documents into the Genemod system. Currently, they have to add the item one by one.

What I did: I designed a self-import tool including research, prototyping, and final handoff to developers. The tool allows customers to upload multiple items into Genemod at once.

Outcome: The tool I designed saves customers and company time(up to 5.7X on average) when migrating from their system to Genemod. Currently, more than a thousand scientists use this tool.

 

Process

 

Stakeholder Interviews

I went to the engineering team to find out constraints.

  1. We agreed to support importing on the box level.

  2. We can support CVS, Excel, and text files.

  3. We want 1 item per row of records format.

With business team

Pain point finding: We usually take a load of man-hours to manually migrate the customer records to our system.

User Interviews

  1. They are familiar with Excel and CSV files because they usually use Excel to record their items.

  2. For users, creating files in our format is easy because similar items are kept in the same box.

  3. Users might want to upload files to a box that already have items in there

 

Competitive analysis

Unique differentiator:

  1. Mailchimp - import contact

  2. Facebook - create custom audiences.

Common elements that work

common elements.png

Gaps that need to be filled

  1. Positioning. Uploading items to a box requires positioning.

    • Solutions: Allows rearrange by right-clicking.

  2. Date format. Items have an expiration date. How to translate string date accurately to the system.

    • Solution 1: I found Php strtotime() would cover most of the date format.

    • Solution 2: I put the preferred format in the template file and error message.

 

User flow

The user flow can’t be disclosed.

 

Design.

I kept the process succinct into 4 main pages; Choose a file, Match, Arrange, and Results

 
1. Choose a file page

1. Choose a file page

2. Match Identifiers page. The system automatically gives feedback on error columns

2. Match Identifiers page. The system automatically gives feedback on error columns

3. Organize page

3. Organize page

4. Result page

4. Result page

 

Identify extreme cases. 

  1. System and user did not match column to the Name identifiers

  2. User matches the Name identifiers with a column that has no record.

  3. User match columns with the same identifier

  4. The system can’t recognize date format

I used an error message under the dropdown box for the error that the system can detect right after the user did the action

I used an error popup, for the error that the system can detect only when the user moves on to the next step.

 

In-team feedback

Issue found: If spaces are taken during uploading. How would we let them recover?

iteration 1

locking the box while uploading vs. letting the exceeded items error.

  • Locking to the box will affect too many other flows on both the design side and the engineering side.

  • Solution: We decide to report the errorneous reagents and give the choice to revert everything or download the error reagents as a file and upload them again elsewhere.

Result page: error items

Result page: error items

 

User testing

I conducted 5 user tests using an interactive prototype (non-disclosure)

  • 4 Genemod scientists, 1 customer

Issue found: All participant’s first approach to rearranging the items is to drag and drop. When they found out it doesn’t work, they then tried right-clicking.

iteration 2

After presenting the finding to stakeholders. We decided to go with drag and drop.

3.4.5 Organize - drag enough space.png

The prototype

1. Upload file

2. Match Identifiers

3. Organize

Upload summary - Case no error

Upload summary - Case no error

Measuring The tool efficiency

This project saves the company and customers resource about 5.7x measuring from the new labs who were purely onboarded with the self-serve import tool compared with those who were onboarded manually and had similar dataset sizes +/- 4300 items. The tool is now live on Genemod platform and is used by thousands of scientists.

My takeaways

  1. Putting an engineering hat on when thinking about the extreme cases saves a lot of time getting bouncing back and forth between the design and engineering team. However, to cover all possible extreme cases still requires a deeper knowledge of the system. 

  2. User testing gives great insight into how users would approach the tool. With our previous knowledge, we decided to go with right-clicking to rearrange; however, user testing proved us wrong. We decided to go with drag and drop instead. 

Visit Genemod: https://genemod.net/ 

 
 

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