Project Overview

Cushman and Wakefield a commercial Realestate firm, developed a tool to interface with customers who are looking for new commercial rental space. They were looking for ways to enhance and increase usability for their Diagnose My Lease tool. 

The set of tools originally - diagnose my rate, diagnose my space, diagnose my market and diagnose my people are based on real things that Cushman and Wakefield work with clients to find out. 

Methods: Contextual Inquiry, Cognitive Walkthrough, Usablility Tests

Tools: Sketch, Invision, Pages

Deliverables: Interactive Powerpoint with Comment Walkthrough. 

Contextual Inquiry

To begin contextual inquiry, my team and I visited Cushman and Wakefield to get a sense of their environment, the purpose of the tools, and how employees engaged with the backend of the system.

To find out more about how a typical user might engage with the tools, I needed to get a better sense of how users interact with the system. To do this I and a team of designers did contextual inquiry interviews with a few potential users. We developed a script and asked each user to perform a set of tasks with the tool. From these interviews we got a lot of information about what was helpful, not helpful and confusing for those users.

Cognitive Walkthrough

Additionally to determine ways to make the website more user friendly, I did a cognitive walkthrough. I did this by completing 5 tasks on the website and paying attention to all of the following:

• How the task flow matches the user mental model.
• What signals were or were not present and/or visible to show users how to use the tool.
• If things on the website/within the tool do what they are supposed to do.
• Feedback informing me that something was happening, when I did clicked on something or moved around the site. 

Findings Plan

Based on what I learned from the contextual inquiry and cognitive walkthrough, I developed a plan and strategy for enhancing the users experience with Cushman Wakefields Realestate development tool. 

The goals of my strategy were the following:

1. Provide rewarding experiences were being to users by creating rapid and useful feedback of tasks completed on site.
2. Increase transparency on website by providing clear explanations on how oils can be used and how inputs assist Cushman and Wakefield in providing outputs.
3.  Utilize language that is clear, simple and assists users with interacting with the system and doesn’t require a lot of contextual knowledge.