PeiHsin Amy Wang
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Product Design and Development
We targets on the higher education and research market, aiming to integrate the open data provided by the Taiwanese government. Our goal is to provide researchers, political organizations, media personnel, and the general public who are interested in gathering and understanding Taiwan's government policies and legislative processes with a comprehensive solution for quick retrieval, reading, and analysis. This concept has been approved internally within the company, but now we need the team to bring the plan to life.
My Role
This is a project that starts from scratch and involves a strategic collaboration with an external engineering team. As the product manager, I am responsible for coordinating and facilitating communication between internal and external teams, overseeing the entire process from product design to launch. My responsibilities include conducting market and user research, defining the scope of product features for each version, planning data acquisition and format specifications, organizing data, UX design, and working closely with the product owner, UI designers, development team, and marketing/business teams to ensure timely progress of product development and launch plans.
Achievement
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The overall design style of the platform received accolades and praise within the company.
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In May 2022, shortly after its launch, the platform quickly gained trial usage from 50 institutions both domestically and internationally.
Process
The entire project is being executed by a small team consisting of myself, one UI designer, and three engineers. We are responsible for data retrieval, data organization, and platform development, respectively.
After conducting market and user research, we discover that integrating various types of government records and implementing full-text search is a key advantage of our product. For the v1 version, our focus is on designing the search functionality and data structure across different files. We create in-depth tagging for individuals, organizations, and regulations within the data, allowing for associations to be made among people, organizations, and regulations within administrative and legislative records. We also design user-friendly full-text search and reading pages, aiming to create a distinctive file platform unlike anything else on the market.
During the design and planning process, the most time-consuming tasks are data source analysis, data format standardization, and data processing flow standardization. Due to the diverse range of data sources, including very early records, and the variations in writing standards, we have to combine multiple rules and continuously search for new rules while organizing the data. However, throughout this process, I also acquire a wealth of tools and methods for data processing.
After completing the v1 version, we initially expect praise from our consulting partners, but instead, they point out several shortcomings. During the initial design phase, in order to quickly develop a solution, we only conduct usability testing using interactive prototypes internally. After conducting testing and validation with users and a few consultants, we finalize the UX design. However, upon the completion of the first version of the platform, the consultants point out a core issue with our design. The design centered around full-text search has fallen into the trap of fragmented data, where users can only find relevant files but can't see the connections and context between similar files.
This eye-opening feedback makes us realize that in order to develop into a research and analysis-focused tool database, we need to prioritize the core user experience. As a result, we further optimize and improve the query process and the functionality and layout of the result pages. After these adjustments are made, the value and positioning of the platform become more distinct. Consequently, when the v2 version is launched, we quickly receive numerous inquiries from potential customers about our product.
