MapIT had received few improvements since its 2016 release, resulting in an outdated and uncompetitive product experience for its user-base.

Talking with key NSW-based users, the key pain-points they had were:

1. Slow and unreliable performance when selecting or loading data.

2. Frustrating and unintuitive document ordering and exporting experience.

3. No ability to save progress or organise work.

Rebuild and redesign MapIT from the ground up to provide a streamlined and performant experience that will act as the foundation for future features and markets.

I led the end-to-end design, working closely with the Product Manager. I conducted competitor and user research, planned the MVP design roadmap, prototyped concepts and provided final designs and documentation.

I started by familiarising myself with:

1. The current user experience and issues with MapIT.

2. Competing products’ functionality and features.

3. Understanding the technicalities of the data available.

Competitors

MapIT would be competing with:

1. Government data tools, such as NSW Planning Portal Spatial Viewer and Survey Mark Locator.

2. Dedicated, mature surveyor tools, such as Dye & Durham Terrain and Benchmrk.

3. In future, property planning tools like Archistar.

I began by mapping out the existing user flow in Figjam, which quickly highlighted the repetitive and unintuitive nature of the existing selection and ordering flow, as mentioned by users. With this as a reference point and the previously researched products as inspiration, I put together a draft of the new user flow in preparation for prototyping.

With the new features and functionality, such as project management and my revised approach to the selection and ordering experience, the flow became more complex, but the individual flows were now more focused, with less repetition and complexity at the granular flow level.

Using Axure RP, I iterated several lofi UI approaches in order to validate the feel of the flows I’d put together in Figjam. I also wanted to validate ideas for new interaction patterns and UI placement before detailed visual design.

For each new layout or interaction, I needed to consider the future; is this adaptable for new data and integrations? The selection panel and layers UI had to be consistent across all selected item types, and scalable to support more items and data in future without becoming overwhelming for the user or requiring another significant redesign down the track.

My main focus was ensuring the selection and ordering flow felt as seamless as possible; a key pain point with the current UI and crucial to get right early to ensure a solid foundation for future functionality.

My secondary focus was the new IA and mental model with the important addition of project management and saving. Now that the user would be able to change between a map view and a dashboard, keeping context would be important. The right navigation patterns and intuitive labelling of the project was essential to nail down at this point.

Moving to Figma after refining the functionality in Axure ensured that I could focus solely on the visual detail and component structure. With a short deadline to provide designs for development, I prioritised the dashboard UI first, with incremental designs supplied for the map UI to follow.

The goal of the dashboard design was to migrate existing functionality from the order history page, nested under account, and turn it into the home of job and order management.

The key user problems to solve here was to provide a better experience for filtering documents by job to aid in search, and also provide clearer statuses for ordered documents, as they expire after 30-days.

Although simple in structure, the new dashboard IA is designed to be flexible for future improvements, particularly the addition of a “project”; a way to group multiple jobs together. This is a necessary level of hierarchy for more complex surveying jobs, where users may have many annotations or extra layers of data enabled.

The map UI, with its more complex flows and interaction methods needed to be refined to ensure a responsive experience from tablet to desktop; something which was lacking on old MapIT.

Using the InfoTrack design system for styling and most base components ensured that piecing together components was quick to do and would reduce effort and ambiguity for the dev team.

My goal with the map UI was to improve the clarity for the user by providing a clear visual hierarchy for the left-hand selection panel component and ensuring that detailed information was surfaced only when the user needed to see it.

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