Case Study
Geofacets is a modern information solution for geoscientists, it offers the world’s largest geological database with over 1.75 million maps, figures, and tables. Geofacets is backed by Elsevier - an information analytics business specializing in science and health, which we have continuously worked with for multiple products.
The Challenge
The features and UI design of Geofacets hadn’t changed much in the ten years since it launched; the focus had been on adding additional content, which makes the interface difficult to understand and use. The UI no longer met users’ expectations nor Elsevier brand guidelines.
DOOR3 was brought in to help Geofacets prioritizing features, making the product meet the typically detail-oriented needs of academic users and researchers, and the more solution-oriented needs of corporate engineers and executives.
Our Goal
With a large database, efficiency is the key, geoscientists need a faster approach to make better interpretations and recommendations. Geofacets seeks to solve the UX/UI issues within the current app, identify and ideate new features to enable faster discovery of information, improve user engagement, and stay consistent with Elsevier branding. One of the main goals of the project is to increase efficiency by accelerating exploration research.
Our Process
The target user groups range from geoscientists to academics and executives, with primary users being geoscientists, who work in regional teams during exploration and development. For ideation purposes, the team analyzed competitors across domains to understand their strengths and weaknesses for specific features. Based on these analyses, we categorized the features from highest to lowest priority to further discuss with the users.
To understand the needs and wants of our target audiences, we conducted in-depth, one-on-one user interviews. We then summarized details for improvements within several major areas, including global overall structure and header bar, search, search with map and search results, etc. As a next step, we created low-fidelity wireframes to describe a maximum of 5 prioritized features for review and iteration with the client stakeholder team.
Our Solution
We simplified the global view by redesigning layout and reducing functionalities. With a highlight on persona based view, and saved list and search results, we made it more personalized for individual users.
It’s essential to have a simple search approach to narrow down results for the users quickly, we provided easily addable and removable filters and made spatial search more prominent.
Results displaying page and result details page can be messy with too much content and functionality. An easily viewable structure is a must.
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