taylor laubach
design

component:

Lists

Goal

Make lists more performant

Role

Got requirements from PM. Led design. Collaborated with Research and Eng.

Problem

High database load

Our product contained a number of pages that simply listed all of a given type of object. This wasn't particularly performant, and as we tried to fix the performance issues, we realized that we weren't sure why users went to these pages or what they did there. We wanted to find that out so that we could effectively balance user experience and performance on these pages.

Old UI

The old lists UI.

Process

Understand what users need

I worked with the Research team to interview users about how they used a number of these pages.

Typical usage patterns

Analysis

I saw that there was a disparity between the primary user goal—find a single item—and the primary user action—scroll through a long list rather than searching. Looking at our lists, I saw that we did a number of things that discourage users from searching. These included:

With this understanding of our users, I was able to work with Eng to identify options for improving performance.

Solution

Support what users need

The solution was to load fewer items in our lists and encourage users to search rather than scroll. To do this, I created a design where:

The new UI

Searching (rather than scrolling) is better for users and more performant

The new lists UI.