Project Background
A proof of concept tool, Initially built and designed by software engineers; The OCR Configuration tool allows users to setup documents for OCR capture. It was discovered to be difficult to use post-launch. I was tasked with improving usability and making the editor’s features more intuitive.
What I did
I redesigned the editor, applying established standards for representing, exposing and positioning functionalities; Features that affected the entire document ( Save Changes, Zoom in, Replace Image ) were placed in a toolbar at the top. The result of selections where confirmed and placed in a side panel which was also used to display helpful “HOW-TO” information.
I redesigned the visual states for the selections, making them easy to detect and numbered them, so that users could quickly identify which selections on the document ( the canvas ) correspond to the ones in the side-panel.
How I did it
I spent most of my time working with the software engineers to understand the underlying workings, technical implications and math that made the editor work. I analyzed the initial interface and discovered many usability heuristic violations within. ( inappropriate controls, unpredictable feedback mechanisms, data loss etc… ) I then suggested solutions to address the usability issues through an iterative design process in collaboration with the software engineers.
