In today's time, information is of paramount importance and affects human life in conspicuous ways. Different companies, solutions and tools are developed to harness this information and retrieve is efficiently. One such tool is 'FA Platform', an Asset Management Solutions developed by FA Solutions Oy, which allows users to manage and search their assets and funds. This thesis contemplates over the issues faced by the search user interface of the 'FA Platform'. The thesis then proposes a new design implementation to improve the user experience of using the search functionality from the user's point of view.
This study explores the concepts of search user interface in-depth to understand the industry standards and research previously done in these fields that could assist this study. Interviews were then conducted with users of the software to identify problems with the current interface. To further identify the possibilities, client's search-usage history was collected and analysed for patterns. The problems identified were that the existing solution lacked features to add new search criteria, option to select multiple values, and the general user interface was cluttered and difficult to comprehend.
This thesis proposed a design prototype of the search user interface and tested ii with users against the existing implementation. Through testing, the new design prototype was found to be easy to use and provided a nice overall user-experience. The proposed design improved over the current implementation in three key areas: Redesigning the layout of search user interfaces to improve legibility; Adding an option to dynamically add more filter-fields as per requirement; and Providing an option to select multiple values for filter-fields.
Having a good search user interface design is an important factor while developing a database management tool as it will increase user’s productivity, allowing them to find exactly what they want, how they want and when they want it. Even more so, a good design can also be very profitable for the company as it causes less distress to users
