Mercer | Mettl Assessment Platform 2.0
Mercer | Mettl's Platform is a robust online testing platform for conducting remote online examinations. With its ready-made question-bank, end-to-end exam management and 100% cheating-free environment, now brought to modern web.
This case study explores the problems identified, methods we used to solve them and the end-result.
Recreation of Mercer | Mettl's Assessment platform was aimed to solve the usability problems that were part of the platform from the very beginning.
But now affecting the UX and Usability of the platform drastically.
Another objective for this project was to bring the platform to modern web standards and organisation's design system, which will enable to cater to an international audience.
To lead the project, manage multi-disciplinary teams and create product documentations.
For creating designs, components, elements and overall structures.
For Design handover, version control, File management and easier develper hand-off.
First step of recreating the product is to understand what the product is, and how it wagers against the heuristic metrics.
This way, we can understand the product and see where the problem lies before initiating the interviews.
Combining years of direct client feedback and the platform feedback mechanism.
We identified certain vital aspects to anchor further investigation, conduct user interviews, and identify actual pain points.
We’ve managed to conduct a series of interviews
The people we interviewed, ranged from experienced to new users and, from general to advanced audience to understand the behaviour of a candidate and the assessment journey holistically.
The main navigation elements were placed in an unorganised way, which causes severe lag in continuous navigation and is challenging to identify when using higher screen resolutions.
It leads to adding more frustration in an already frustrated test-taking environment.
People unanimously agreed that the platform looked visually dated and out of touch with modern website design.
The test experience is not intuitive; interaction feels out of place and doesn’t sit right with the modern websites people are used to.
The platform was slow to load and/or appeared to look slow compared to similar websites, and people were frustrated.
They expected the website to be as fast as modern websites, if not faster.
Clear, crisp and concise goals needs to be defined which will be used to focus on what's really important and upon finishing the project, these Goals will be metrics that measures the overall success of the project.
These are the main goals for this platform that needs to be conquered to be considered successful.
People should not be left wondering to identify the next steps.
The navigation pattern of the new platform must conform to the modern and responsive navigation paradigm, with highlighted identifiers, and scalable on high-resolution screens.
The platform's user interface should be visually refreshed and use the organisation's new dynamic design system, and extend the support to incorporate new functionalities in the future.
And resonates with modern web sensibilities.
The interface, interactions, and elements should feel intuitive, native to the device, and assist people with their tests without overloading information.
It should NOT push them to learn new interaction patterns.
The new platform should have a competitively fast performance by improving Time-to-Interaction.
This will increase the overally perceived interface responsiveness and push it in the realms of modern web.
For getting started, ideation, brainstorming, and lots of experimentation
Team went through several rounds of ideation and enforced a fail-fast methodology to experiment.
We started trying out new and innovative design patterns, which builds upon the exisitng UX and make the interactions more cohesive.
We spent ~ 1-1.5 months for the ideation and iterations before finalising a shippable design candidate.
The new designs were thoroughly vetted by the teams involved and necessary improvements and changes were done to contain the scope of the project but without comprising the underlying UX of the new product.
The heurisitic analysis of the new system was done by the Design team for each iterations of the new design to see if the solution proposing are effectively solving the problems at hand or not.
Two sizes. Four finishes. Stainless steel and glass design.
And then we created...
After a battling pandemic and the rigorous development cycles for more than a year, We were able to ship the first release of the new and improved Assessment platform.
It was loaded with a brand new interface, new features and revised implementation of existing features and overall better UX.
The new platform was specifically created to solve the UX issues that I've highlighted in above sections.
It also aimed to refresh the interface and bring modern sensibilities for newer generations.
The added support of Responsive design, and end-to-end Internationalisation helped us open the platform to international audience - who can share the same assessment experience irrespective of geography and the language.
By using latest technology stack and best practices, combined with an upgraded flow of the assessment journey.
We brought the platform to modern web.
faster as compared to the Original Platform.
Candidates needs to diagnose their systems, fill their credentials and prepare for assessment.
This is where the candidate tests their skills and experiences the challenges.
Let's take a close look
Before the assessment begins, Candidate has to diagnose their systems, provide the permissions, and verify their personal information to begin the actual assessment.
There are certain stages that candidate has to go through before the fun begins.
Candidates begins their assessment journey by landing on this interface, which showcases the the most important information for a candidate.
Information about the assessment, as well as, the best practices to have a positive experience.
Candidate provides us with the necessary system-level permissions, and all the permission-level diagnosis is taken care of through an automated system.
Candidates begins their assessment journey by landing on this interface, which showcases the the most important information for a candidate.
Information about the assessment, as well as, the best practices to have a positive experience.
Section details act as a perfect opportunity for candidates to review the sections, understand the assessment flow and plan ahead.
An important point in assessment journey to formulate the stratergy.
This is where the magic happens.
New Assessment interface aims to solve the major UX issues - ranging from Navigation blunders, better implementation of exisiting features which pools towards a great experience for the candidates.
By updating and categorising the navigation elements in the interface, We created a much better navigation paradigmn than previous iteration.
By reducing the clutter and focusing on what really matters for candidates, We created a simple yet powerful interface.
By combining the information related to assessment as well as per-section instructions, candidate can consume the information from a single interaction.
And all this, without cluttering the interface whatsoever.
Before ending the assessment, Candidates wanted to view the progress they've made.
To solve the problem, we created an assessment overview segment which allowed candidates to view overall progress as well as per-section level progress, with clear indicators of how many questions they've answered, marked and left unattempted.
Available on multiple devices and resolutions.
This is where the assessment is marked as concluded.
Candidate is greeted with a cheery message, along with quick view of the result, real-time report generation and further instructions about the next steps in the assessment journey.
The new platform has also been assessed to the latest accessibility standards by WCAG to provide a better UX to all users.
The new design was accepted by the users with positive thoughts.
And the feedback recorded via our analytic tools was exactly what we wanted to achieve with the new platform.
Handling a product of this scale and size, and revamping it from the scratch was a huge opportunity that helped me understand the role of UX in a much greater sense.
These are four key learnings that I grasped from this project.
The actual problems faced by people needs to be identified with much precision, but keep that in mind that not all problems are as straightforward as they look.
It is important to verify the root causes of the problems before solving it.
It is an indisputable fact that without knowing your audience, you cannot solve a problem.
So always have a crystal clarity on your demographic and WHO are we solving the problem for.
Not everything we imagine can be part of the project scope. Sometimes features needs to be modified/removed to make it compatible with the system limitations.
Accept the system limitations and try to create best possible experience without sacrificing the business.
There's no perfect product created at first attempt, so what we need to do is, make the best product we can be, and let the audience help us navigate to the "perfect product" segment.
Ask for feedback and keep iterating the cycle to make the experience as positive as possible.
