Scribe by Apex
Scribe by Apex, CAD tool re-design
Improved the toolbar experience for a digital 2D/3D floor plan model sketch tool to align with business initiatives to move into a B2C model to gain more users.
Role
UX Designer
Company
Apex | Proptech
Areas
Design, UX Strategy, Research
UX Impact
The usability test demonstrated an improvement in cognitive load and task completion. The results showed an overall increase in usability from its previous design.
Reduced time on task by
80%
Task success rate
+30%
Reduced task complexity by
a single-click
Overview
Problem:
As a B2B company, Scribe wanted to expand its user base, but its UI wasn’t intuitive enough to be easily accessible to break into the B2C market.
Goal:
Redesign the Scribe toolbar to improve its usability for a consumer-facing audience and optimize task completion.
About Scribe: Scribe’s tool enables engineers, interior designers, and surveyors to sketch and share 2D and 3D floor plan models digitally.
Determined pain points through foundational research:
Icons without labels and icon inconsistency
Lack of entry points to purchase plans
Toolbars at every corner
Want to read more about it? Dive deeper.
Outcomes of the redesign:
Through usability testing, the new toolbar design reduced cognitive overload, simplifying task complexity to a single-click experience.
This reduced time on task by 80% and increased the task success rate by 30% compared to its previous design.
Want our testing script and learn more about the outcomes? Dive deeper.
Original design
The original design created a cognitive overload:
Lack of icon usability
“Why are there 3 different gear icons?”
“What does this icon mean?”
“What does this action do?”
Lack of pricing plan visibility
Horizontal and vertical toolbar
“Why are there multiple toolbars?”
“Are we optimizing for space?”
After UX magic
Foundational research helped us identify the problem. Usability testing helped us refine and further informed design decisions.
Context is everything:
New menu includes icons with labels
Allows users to know what to expect when clicking on an action
Grouped menu items to collapsible menu that does not need a persistent view from the user.
You just read a high-level overview.
Want the 500-feet view? Dive deeper.
Full UX Process
Discovery & Foundational Research
Apex and its user base
The main goal Scribe wanted to tackle was ensuring the sketcher was easy to use for anyone to try out, shifting from its current demographic of professional engineers, interior designers, and surveyors to non-specialized individuals.
An example demographic would be a self-taught house flipper who is still in the realm of real-estate.
It’s also a growing field that would be especially easy to market to online as many new flippers worked independently and had no pre-existing contractual obligations to existing software.
Discovery
For a house flipper who does not specialize in using sketcher tools, they still need visuals when it comes to staging a house.
Lack of visuals affects budget and planning management for house renovations.
Pain points
Discovery led to the following pain point findings:
Icon-usage inconsistency: 3 different icons were used for settings with no clear way to distinguish which does what
Lack of entry points to purchase plans: The pricing plan does not give information on the different credits available to purchase and how to purchase more credits from this current screen.
Toolbars at every corner: 3 different toolbars, but no understanding of which toolbar is tied to what.
Icons without labels: Universal iconography is big, but in complex toolbars, icons without labels just becomes confusing.
Scribe’s original design in production
Design
Low Fidelity Screen Options
For the ideation phase, we decided to create three low fidelity mockups of the revised website and voted on which mockup to use for our high fidelity prototype. We felt that this design was the most intuitive to use and made the most distinction between the website settings and the sketcher.
Selected Concept
Iteration 1
Iteration 2
First High Fidelity Prototype Screens
Elevated the fidelity to match the company’s branding and included a full user flow.
Test
Learn more about the testing plan.
-
I would like you to tell me your thoughts on this page (Home Page)? What do you see?
You’re pretty new to using this software! Where would you go on this page to learn some tips and tricks about how to use Scribe?
The screen is a little small, go ahead and increase to full screen.
Let’s say you’ve just finished sketching this property on your screen and you want to share it with your colleagues. How might you do that?
How many credits does it take to share this document?
You’ve shared the link and now want to download the file as well - where might you go to do that?
How many credits does it take to download this document?
Your boss gets you started on a second project and asks you to share and download Project #2 but you’re all out of tokens! What pricing plan would you purchase to be able to share and download your second project?
Imagine you’ve recently changed your email address. Let’s go ahead and update the information on Scribe.
Your colleague is asking you to change the measurements from feet to meters. Go ahead and make those changes.
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View tutorials
Fullscreen
Share document
Download document
Purchase credits
Change account details
Change project settings
Usability Test Report
Issue 1: Credit system is still not explicit enough
Solved by adding a ‘more info’ button when exporting/sharing the design and by including a popup window explaining the pricing plans
Issue 2: Sketcher settings was still causing confusion for users looking for the project settings
Solved by changing project settings icon to be a variant of the gear icon
After creating our high-fidelity prototype, my team and I conducted usability testing on 5 participants using a uniform test script.
Iterate
High Fidelity Screens Iteration
Guerilla Usability Testing Changes: We tested our new prototype iteration and found no usability issues using the same test script as we did before. Every participant had passed their tasks. We did find that a few participants preferred the word ‘download’ over ‘export’ when they were giving suggestions at the end of their session, and thus made this change as well as a few alignment changes to refine our final product.
Conclusions
I’m grateful to have worked with Scribe and applied UX principles to their product to help meet their business goals.
Reflections
Strengths: The app already has a user base to lean on and has done research on its prior clients as well as competitive analysis. Its existing client base doesn't mind the learning curve to approaching the tool. Scribe also has several tutorials on how to use it on its website
Weaknesses: The new client base Scribe is trying to target will not understand the tool without watching the tutorials, and the tutorials are quite lengthy to get through
Opportunities: A user onboarding would drastically mitigate user confusion and is in the works for the company. As for business opportunities, the quicker Scribe adds its new features and onboarding, the wider its client base will become. They might be able to transition to B2C in addition to their current B2B model.
Threats: The tool itself and the website it is hosted on are coded in different languages, making the interactions difficult. Their Unity developers are not at the stage in which they would be able to edit the tool itself to make the UI more intuitive.
