Financial News Filter Redesign

Apollo is a financial news and information application.

Problem: Apollo needed to add new functionality to their filter and wanted to enhance the experience to filters easier to use and understand.

Role: Sole Designer

After conducting a heuristic evaluation of the product, I identified there was a number of different visual and interaction styles and was able to facilitate their decision to only use material design guidelines moving forward. For the filter component enhancement, I identified a number of elements that had a confusing experience.

There was no display of selected filters
The selected state was the same as the highlight and not very clear
There was no display of how many matching elements there were
There was no clear organization method for how filters were organized and displayed
There was no connection between the filter search and the filter widget (We were not able to integrate this during this enhancement)

Iteration 1

I started by proposing 2 variations. The goal was to begin addressing issues 1, 3, and 4 by fixing some of the easy changes.

Using pills to quickly identify which filters have been selected

Moving filters to the left and integrating search

Iteration 2

The team decided to follow the left side filters because it felt more natural. A couple of requirements changed and a new piece of functionality was needed.

Each filter can be a boolean search: Either must include or cannot Include.

Using a click to toggle to switch between And and Not

Using a slider to switch between And and Not

Iteration 3

I brought up the designs to Material design fidelity and changed a few elements to better inform users what different states are doing. I also delivered the designs in both a light theme and a dark theme

Other Changes

During the process I also proposed changes to the widget framework itself. I felt their were too many icons that controlled settings that were rarely used. To solve this, I introduced a settings panel and cut down on the number of icons in the widget bar.

Conclusions

My client viewed this project as incredibly successful. All of their immediate needs were filled and the team was able to start developing and implementing almost immediately. The feature is about to be released where metric capture and a quarterly qualitative review will help define if users find the filter changes an improvement.