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©2025 Alex Woo

Improved Usability of Data Analysis Tool

Client : SK Inc. C&C
Keyword : B2B, User Reserch, Prototyping
Timeline : Jan — July 2021 (7 months)
My Role : UX Researcher, Lead of UI Designer

Product Integration Aligned with Business Strategy

Advancements in technology have made data-driven decision-making standard, involving more stakeholders in the analysis process and lowering the learning curve. To align with this shift, I focused on enhancing usability in the new version to simplify the user experience and unify the product.

Find Problems

1️⃣ User Journey MapFollowing the tutorial, I tried data analysis of competitor's products and captured the user's pain points.

2️⃣ In-depth InterviewI conducted interviews with stakeholders providing customer consulting to gather insights on necessary improvements and user feedback, confirming customer situations and needs when adopting existing products.

3️⃣ Ethnography 📍By observing the data analyst's workflow in an ethnographic context, I identified the stage where the most difficulties occurred.

Problems and Solutions

The workflow is the core screen of the product, visualizing the data analysis process through ‘Nodes’.
Analyzing data requires numerous functions, which can overwhelm users with too many choices, similar to the complexity of an airplane cockpit. To simplify user decisions and visually clarify the flow of data, I focused on improving the following key issues.

1. All options pulled out → Context menu for flexible expansion

Before, The fixed area, marked in red, covers most of the screen.
After, The fixed area is minimized and expands more fluidly through the blue area.

Before, Arrangement of complex information requiring multiple gaze movements

I noticed that the user's gaze movement was overly complex due to scattered information. To address this, I improved the layout based on functional pattern research from SaaS products, reducing unnecessary eye movement.
Additionally, by only displaying buttons that are relevant to the current state of the selected node, user choices were reduced by over 80%.
The right options panel was redesigned to be collapsible, allowing users to expand it as needed. This improvement provides more workspace, with the panel now being expandable to about 75% more than before.

2. Unclear nodes → Simplify & symbolize

Plan A, Icon node type, Received the least number of votes.

Plan B, Supplemented the shortcomings of the existing card type

Plan C, The most votes, But unprofessional tone and manners

Final design, Synthesize multiple opinions and contexts to highlight important model nodes in the data analysis process

1️⃣ Convert to icon-type node
Through testing, icon shapes proved more distinguishable than cards in complex flows. I improved status display with intuitive icons and dimmed unfinished nodes for clarity.

2️⃣ Simplify categories
I reduced seven complex node categories to four streamlined steps, improving readability and alignment with AcuInsight’s functions.

3️⃣ Switch to a universal name
A survey showed that 61% of users preferred easily understandable labels, highlighting the need to fully transition the target audience to CDS.

3. High-difficulty node connection → Auto Connection suggestion

1. Users manually align each node to improve flow visibility.

2. Users struggle to find the connector.

1️⃣ Add affordance via handle 🖐
I applied a clear affordance by exposing the handle on hover, making connections more intuitive.

2️⃣ Is direct connection the only option?
CDS users often link objects sequentially rather than placing all nodes at once. To support this, we proposed 'Guide Mode', enabling automatic connections via a category menu—successfully validated through prototyping.

Changed Default Mode, The default was previously set to Free Drop Mode,
but it has now been switched to the newly introduced Guide Mode!

Sum up

📍 Next Steps
Although the project has long been completed, there are still areas where the experience could have been refined further. Given the broad scope of improvements and the many tasks at hand, it’s something I’d like to address in future iterations, in line with the development cycle.

📓 Retrospect
This project provided a valuable opportunity to incorporate feedback from multiple stakeholders through field research, as well as to lead the suggestion and implementation of a large-scale B2B product in a collaborative environment with several manufacturers.

Additionally, the positive feedback from an internal seminar, where the usability improvements were recognized, confirms that the UX/UI has seen significant enhancement.