November 2020 – Mai 2021
Product Design Consultant
Cooperation with Andreas Kleinadel
Challenge
GBI-Genios is one of the leading hosts for information about media, businesses and the economy in Germany. The platform provides a powerful research tool, able to search thousands of databases with several hundred million documents.
The more powerful the tool became over the last years, the more complexity was added to its functions. It became increasingly difficult to provide all of the mechanics within a reasonable user experience.
Solution
At the beginning of the project, a thorough investigation of the old platform was made. Two main functions of the website were identified – to explore broadly and to search specifically.
In close collaboration with the stakeholders, we have done an analysis of the platforms main user groups and have decided to provide advancing levels of complexity through adaptive design – giving more casual users the ability to use surface functions and more experienced users the in-depth functions which they are used to.
Once the design concept was clear, we have completely redesigned the web-based product on the basis of a style guide which we have created.
Impact
The powerful but somewhat outdated tool has been completely overhauled. The use of adaptive design principles, as well as global design patterns has enabled an increase in new premium users, by making the formerly intimidating service accessible and intuitive to use.
The old website – homepage and search results
In order to redesign the product, a style guide, as well as a pattern library were created – finding a middle ground between a future-proof digital product and the habits of the existing users.
The style guide as a basis for the development of the UI
The design process happened in a close collaboration with both the stakeholders, as well as the developers.
Due to the nature of the product, a desktop-first approach has been chosen, as the users are mostly professionals doing desk research.
Yet still we made sure that the product is optimised for desktop computers, tablets, as well as smartphones.
In order to search the vast network of databased which Genios is able to tap into, a powerful set of search tools is necessary.
For this purpose, multiple layers of filters for different applications and different types of media have been assembled.
Each search result can be displayed in different levels of complexity, ranging from a simple list-view, over a comparable grid, up to a detailed preview-browser, which enables the user to save, curate, share and purchase each document.
The platform is able to differentiate between a dozen types of media, ranging from newspapers, over eBooks to videos.
These all have different criteria when it comes to displaying and comparing them, so a variety of teasers and detail pages was designed.
After optimising all aspects of the manual document search, an automatic monitoring has been implemented. This allows the user to program search parameters in order to receive relevant results in desired intervals.
The website has been designed to work in both a light and a dark mode through a custom conversion table. The modes can easily be switched according to the users preferences.
