Why Redesign?
COI tracking is hard and time-consuming. At Jones, we do everything we can to make our users’ life easier. Jones is a workflow automation tool, which means that every compliance workflow you handle today via email, phone calls, or documents — we want to automate. We do all the heavy lifting on the backend (with technologies like OCR, NLP & AI), so you can do everything with the click of a button. We strive to make compliance invisible so you can focus on the more important tasks, like building relationships with your tenants and vendors, while we take care of the rest.
Our insurance workflows are built for simplicity. We believe that our users deserve an effortless and transparent experience during the entire compliance process. This new platform redesign reflects these ideas and moves us towards our goal of killing the compliance headache and making our users’ lives easier.
Challenges
User-types: personas, roles, and permissions that creates different views
Jones has a variety of different user-types, all with different views and permissions on the platform. Therefore, any changes require careful considerations regarding how they will affect each user-type’s experience.
Before we even started thinking about a redesign, we sat down with our customers to find out how they were using our platform and what they wanted to get from Jones. With the feedback we gained from our customers, we focused this redesign on making sure the new Jones platform works for any and every use case.
Future-proofing: scaling the platform for more use cases
Jones has big dreams regarding managing compliance, and we’re always discovering more pain points we can solve for our users. This means our product roadmap is always growing, with exciting features being planned and added every day.
Adding more features sounds great; however, without proper planning, they could easily create unnecessary clutter, which goes against one of our main principals — simplicity and ease of use. With this redesign, we restructured our product architecture according to best practices so we are better prepared to add new features without affecting current functionality.
What changed in the redesign and why?
What’s more important — Hitchcock rule
“The size of any object in your frame should be proportional to its importance to the story at that moment.”
— Hitchcock
Old Header
In the past, Jones’s header took up most of the screen real-estate, making it seem like navigation was more important than the actual content — the compliance list.
New Header
With the new redesign, we were able to almost double the screen real-estate of the compliance list, and by doing that, enable our users to more easily concentrate on the main job they came to do.
Good website navigation is not ‘in the way’ — it disappears into the background
We all have past experiences — Jakob’s Law
“Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”
— Nielsen
What Dr. Jakob Nielsen’s simple statement reveals is something innate in human nature: we like to be able to anticipate what an experience will be like, based on our past experiences. Source
1. Settings & Location for logout:
On the old design, the settings for the email notification, as well as the logout, were hidden within the profile as a secondary tab, accessed by clicking on the profile icon in the header. Although we don’t want to encourage users to log out or shut off notifications, it was not the most common placement for either feature.
Old Profile Settings
In the redesign, we created a dropdown from the profile icon (a practice common on Youtube/Linkedin etc.), which enabled more transparency and accessibility to those features, as well as scalability within the dropdown.
New Profile Settings
2. Search for project/properties:
By watching the user’s behavior on the platform, we were unsurprised to find that many of them were not using the search functionality on the projects/properties dropdown. It’s not very intuitive to find a dropdown that turns into a search box, as we had on the old platform. As users have learned from their experience on other platforms, search functionality is usually highlighted by representations such as search icons and/or keyword, so we switched to that style in our redesign.
Old vs New Search
People do judge a book by its cover — Aesthetic effect
Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as a more usable design.
Users are more likely to want to try and use a visually appealing product. This effect is at its strongest when the aesthetics serve to support and enhance the content and functionality of the product. It builds trust.
Personal and positive relationships with a design evoke feelings of affection, loyalty, and patience — all significant factors in the long-term usability and overall success of a design. Source
Final words
Jones has big dreams regarding managing compliance, and we’re always discovering more pain points that we can solve for our users.
I am so proud to have joined a company that takes their user’s biggest headache out of their daily job!
COI Manager’s Desk — Undisclosed Client Office
Piles of COI papers, leases, and deals previously needed to be filed, organized, tracked, and searched through manually. Behind each paper, there was a contact person who needed to be chased down, sometimes against the ticking clock. This process was inefficient and slow — a process that dragged down operations and made managing projects and properties difficult.
Jones took all that hassle and turned it into a clean, sleek, amazingly simple platform that automates the work for users.
Jones is a product that addresses real daily pain points and minimizes them significantly.
Just from looking at this photo, I feel that being part of Jones is actually doing good for this world.
My goal is to continue to be in touch with our users, hear them, understand them, and solve the pain points in their daily work by delivering a simple, automated, innovative, and friendly product.
