This application is used by Sales and Marketing professionals to model and simulate airplane performance given a multitude of physical, environmental and structural variables.
Lead Designer
This calculation engine part of this application allows for a single attribute to have multiple values, and more specifically, a range of values, a series of arbitrary values or a combination of those. However, the interface at the time only allowed for a single value to be entered into a cell, which is pretty conventional behavior from applications like Excel. However, I wanted my users to be able to take advantage of this functionality.
The first thing I did was to get a baseline understanding of what calculating multiple values actually means. I interviewed users, both sales professionals and engineers to understand what they could do with a range of values. I discovered that this unlocked huge capabilities for them. Were they constrained to the one value per field paradigm, they would have had to create a new work item for every value calculated. But by providing the application a range of values, it allowed the application to essentially compile the multiple work items into a single work item, which saved the users many hours of redundant work.
I continued my research and users helped me generate some low fidelity prototypes of how this could be accomplished. This involved a flyout interface that would be activated by the user. This was the preferred mechanism for the users over a modal dialog box because it allowed them to more easily stay in a state of mental flow.
Through revisions and adjustments and testing, I came to the current solution. A representation of the workflow is shown below.
Step1:
The user wants to input multiple values into a single cell from this screen.
Step 2:
The user clicks on the multiple values icon within the cell.
Step 3:
The user is presented with this pop-out and is able to input a range of values or multiple specific values or a combination.
Step 4: