“How might we redesign the Home tab in ArcGIS Pro ribbon, accessed by every user that goes through the application, so that they can easily prepare their data for projects?”
Introduction
ArcGIS Pro is a ribbon-based application where all the tools relevant to a workspace (view) are accessible from the ribbon tabs. The Home Tab was the core tab corresponding to the Catalog View. The goal was to redesign the Home Tab’s layout and add/remove tools so that a majority of the data management tasks could be completed in the Catalog View more easily.
Team:
UX Designer (me)
Product Engineer
Product Owner
Duration:
1 month
My Role:
Design Research
Card Sorting
Information Architecture
Wireframes
Problem Overview
Home Tab in ArcGIS Pro
The problems with the current layout of the Home Tab were:
The order of tool groups (Clipboard, Organize, Metadata, etc) did not make sense with respect to the user workflows.
This ribbon was not making use of the contextual behavior and progressive disclosure of a ribbon UI (the Styles group would be enabled for only one GIS file type - Styles).
There were a lot of tools accessible through context menus for files and folders (and not available on the ribbon tab at all). We had to determine which tools could be added and how to create space for them.
Research
Design Research
Domain knowledge: Looking through help documentation for Catalog in ArcGIS Pro, studying the GeoNet forum posts for relevant user feedback, practicing data management tutorials to learn about the workflows.
User feedback indicated that they could not successfully locate the controls they needed in the Catalog View, and the Home Tab was virtually useless. They wanted to use ArcCatalog again which was a legacy software with multiple usability issues, but the relevant tools were accessible.
ArcCatalog
Data management UX patterns: Design research for data management in other products such as Tableau, Microsoft Explorer, iOS Finder.
Microsoft’s Explorer used a Home Tab to house all the generic controls that could be used by all the file types in a view. As soon as a specific file type was selected, the Manage tab would appear with tools that were relevant to it.
Home tab with generic controls enabled
Contextual tab with specific controls for the Picture data type
Card Sort
I set up a card sorting activity with the subject matter experts - senior UX designer, product engineer, product owner and developer. I created cards for each tool or control available in the Catalog View - from the Home Tab and context menus for each of the 6 data types. We organized them by relevance in the first round and then assigned group names and created a logical order in round two.
Using the data, I compiled a set of tools that would be available on the Home Tab.
Design Solution
“Balsamiq became a means of communication with non-designer stakeholders, and helped support the quick turnaround time for the project.”
Wireframes
Using the card sort results as a starting point to create groups of tools
Iteration 1
Final iteration of the Home Tab with 4 simple groups that aligned more closely with the user’s workflows.
Clipboard: tools that are always required at any level in the Catalog.
Organize: tools to set up data in the project and bring it up-to-date.
Create: tools then add/create new data.
Metadata: tools to alter the metadata, once it has been organized.
Final iteration
Contextual Tabs
We followed the same exercises - card sorting and affinity mapping - for the contextual tabs for each data type. There are 6 major data types, with subsets. Two key interaction design challenges were - determining when the contextual tab became active (whether on selection or on opening of the file/folder) and secondly, how to keep the order of tool groups as similar as possible to that of the Home Tab (so that users are not disoriented).
Database - core tab
Database - contextual tab
Catalog Tab - in Action!
Once the wireframes were locked in, I worked with the developer to prototype the designs in the application directly, as there was no need to create any UI designs.
The most noticeable changes are:
The Home Tab was renamed to the Catalog Tab. This is in line with the rest of the app where each core view (Map, Catalog, etc) has a core tab whose name corresponds with it.
We added generic icons for the Open, New, Add, and Import buttons. This helps with the contextual behavior of the application and their dropdown menus will contain the more specific tools (New Database, Add Style) as the user explores the Catalog View.
Contextual tabs for Styles and Databases.
Styles contextual tab
Database contextual tab
See product release video about this change (from 00:25 to 00:50): What’s new in ArcGIS Pro 2.3
Impact
While I cannot share specifics on usage statistics, our team was contacted by the company’s Educational Services team - who create GIS classes and tutorials and as a result, use a lot of data management tasks. They said their job has become much easier in preparing project packages for various GIS courses.