How might we improve the search experience to help procurement specialists find important information quickly and easily?
According to USAspending.gov, the federal government spent $3.98 trillion in 2017 on contracts purchasing goods and services from 3rd party vendors across sectors including healthcare, energy, defense, and homeland security.
Procurement specialists are the gatekeepers who determine which companies win these contracts through due diligence and vetting processes. Their process generally consists of researching vendor past performance, project history, and compliance with local and state laws.
Our research team laid groundwork by interviewing and surveying 13 government workers (200 were contacted) to collect insights on vendor procurement goals, needs, pain points, and current solutions.
Key takeaways that supported our design efforts include:
solve this by seeking anecdotal accounts from municipalities
said their greatest frustration (with the process) was time spent collecting information about vendors
- Currently no centralized resource to find information
I started by identifying the search experience's current functionalities, what content could be variable, and exploring ways to display them in a simple layout which our audience could understand how to use and the client could easily customize.
- search company / person
- filter to narrow results
- view results by data source
- sort data points
- create an alert
- save a search
- export report
- logo
- color palette
- data sources
- buttons (with or without icons)
The existing search flow utilized a separate search page and results page. Users almost never returned to the first page as they can continually edit their search via the results page. So I opted for a single interface to reduce unnecessary steps and align with most user's mental model of a search platform.
During usability testing of the current platform, 3 of 4 people were confused using the sidebar menu as it could drill down multiple layers at a time and could be unwieldy at times. The results opened in an endless scroll accordion-style interface, while the menu displayed icons, labels, # of search results, and stepped colors to indicate navigation. It was a lot to process.
Color: I used Vigilant's brand colors to create a clean frame with its sidebar menu and headers, so users can focus their attention on the search results, and accent colors to call out navigation, search, and hyperlinks. These colors can be easily customized for branding.
Menu: I kept the menu's UI simple, displaying only data sources and number of results in order to make it easy for users to quickly navigate without being overwhelmed. Our product manager helped define which data sources to include based on user research.
Vigilant let users enter strings of complex operators in the search bar to narrow their results, allowing them to do things like exclude specific words from searches and use multiple filters at a time. This made sense to engineers who were used to the syntax, but I felt required more guidance for new users.
Instead of seeing just a list of operators, I created a dropdown menu succinctly communicating what users can filter by, which opens a focused search bubble with an example query and syntax. I let filters live under the search bar in order to call user attention while allowing them room to add multiple filters.
3 of 4 users during usability testing felt the original search results page was visually crowded, as it showed relevant results as well asdata from other sources not selected (in red). That serves as extra info users have to process not in line what they'd expect.
I decided to display only data relevant to the source users selected so they could find information precisely, and users had no problem navigating or understanding what data they were looking at.
- 0 out of 4 users felt the search results page was visually crowded
- 0 out of 4 users had difficulty navigating the search results
- 3 out of 4 did not understand all terms used in data sources
My updates to the search experience made it easy for procurement specialists to understand how to use the platform and complete tasks, and received positive feedback from government workers excited about new solutions in their space.
...But still a ways to go. Government workers were confused by some of our terminology and, while easy to use, our solution wasn't yet valuable enough to warrant paying a subscription.
Of the 4 government workers we validation tested with, 2 worked in procurement specifically which was a good start!
Redesigning the search experience was just one part of our team's scope, so due to time constraints, I wasn't able to adequately learn how people would engage with the filtering experience but would like to with further testing.
Additionally, after we presented our final designs, I explored adding a feature to filter by specific date ranges as I felt procurement specialists might want to see recent results or segment by time.
