MATLAB Live Classes

Improving discoverability and experience of classes in Live Editor

Problem

• The vast majority of MATLAB users does not use classes or they use them without the need to edit them.
• Classes can be very useful even for non-developers, however they seem to be hard to understand
• Our research showed that Power users – developers and advanced MATLAB programmers – find it hard to read and documentation is poorly supported.

Goal

• Make classes more discoverable and accessible to regular users
• Improve classes creation and editing experience
• Provide a better documentation experience

Year

2018

Role

Product Designer

Team

UX Researcher, Developer

Ideation

The team gathered to sketch some design ideas and alternative solutions. We focused mostly on creation and documentation task flows. 

Mockups

We considered using different discovery mechanisms for creating a class and we decided the most promising were:

• introducing a new file menu item – file new > live class
• inline autocompletion widget would recognize the keyword and generate a template

 

These approaches were not mutually exclusive, both improve overall experience by providing multiple ways of completing the task. Based on some interviews with internal users we decided to increase fidelity and produce walkthroughs for the two main user tasks – Class creation and Class documentation 

Walkthrough

https://microplasma.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/live_classes_walk-Amy_01.mov