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Transforming an environmental sampling software through UX research and design
Soil and groundwater sampling is a technical, high-stakes task. SampleServe, a startup serving 30+ clients across the U.S., helps companies do it at scale. Despite strong backend and IT capabilities, their software had never seen a designer before.
That’s where my team came in. As part of a semester-long client project at the University of Michigan, my team of four UX designers worked directly with SampleServe’s CEO and product team to uncover usability pain points, redesign critical workflows, and deliver fully functional UI changes - all of which were shipped.
SampleServe had strong technical and management capabilities but had never worked with a designer, hence lacked strategic design insight. Their product had accumulated usability issues due to rapid development and lacked user-centered thinking.
At the University of Michigan, students work on real-world client projects as part of their coursework; a perfect fit for SampleServe to explore the value of UX design for their rapidly growing software.
SampleServe’s original problem statement was broad. With no prior design team, there was a lot of ground to cover.
To make meaningful progress within a semester, we strategically narrowed the scope to focus on strengthening their core user experience, particularly around project setup and data uploading. From there, we set clear, actionable goals, and achieved them!
Improved task success rate for the data uploading process by 36%
Reduced time for task completion for the project setup by 34%
Increased trust and clarity in the interface
Ensured solutions are dev-feasible and shippable
Heuristic Evaluation
Competitive Analysis
Journey Mapping
User Interviews (5 users)
Usability Testing (5 users)
Surveys (USE Questionnaire: Usefulness, Satisfaction, and Ease of use, Computer System Usability Questionnaire)
Rapid studio sessions (3 users)
Usability Testing on redesigns (5 users)
Surveys (USE Questionnaire: Usefulness, Satisfaction, and Ease of use, Computer System Usability Questionnaire)
Users weren’t confident their inputs were saved due to missing confirmation messages.
Users weren’t confident their inputs were saved due to missing confirmation messages.
Two inconsistent interfaces (third-party vs in-house)
Rigid CSV formatting with poor error messaging
No way to fix upload errors, resulting in frequent IT intervention
Unified the upload interface through style guide
Added editable fields
Designed flexible CSV parsing
Clear error states and recovery options
A summary of the aftermath of deploying our validated, usable and accessible designs.
Increased user trust in actions
Reduced reliance on backend intervention
Handled real user pain points from recent software changes
36% increase in success rate for data uploading
34% reduction in time to complete project setup
Design changes shipped and adopted into production
Our team bypassed proximity bias during the user research process
We fixed areas of cognitive overload for the user
One very surprised CEO, we uncovered problems his customers never told him.
That’s all from my project for now.
As I am still working on this project, I keep uncovering more user insights and ways to elicit them. I keep making my designs better in a very hands-on way.
