Bluebeam Revu is a PDF markup, editing, and viewing solution for the AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction) industry. For the 2018 release, the UI was updated, which included how users interact with its panel elements. My responsibilities spanned leading the UI and UX for the greater Revu product team.
A core component of Revu’s interface has always been its panels. In previous versions of Revu, a panel is an expandable and collapsible element of the interface which contains feature functionality and controls. Different features are organized in their own tabs within a panel, and the entire panel can be toggled between its expanded and collapsed state through the click of a button.
Because multiple tabs can exist within a single panel, and there is a panel on the left, right, and bottom of the interface, many users went several versions without fully utilizing all of Revu’s features, or knowing they even existed. This was costly for both the user and Bluebeam.
The goal was to increase the discoverability of Revu’s panels and, in turn, many of its long-standing core features.
Analytics was not in place within Revu until the 2019 time-frame, so the team and myself had to rely on user interviews, as well as interviewing internal stakeholders.
We collected and viewed profile files from users (a way to save and load a custom configuration of Revu’s interface), as well as request screenshots. From Bluebeam’s internal sales and support teams, we measured the frequency users were requesting features that already existed as a tab in a panel.
From this, we got a picture of how many tabs our users typically had active, and which panels they utilized.
For users to be more successful at discovering Revu’s tab-in-a-panel features, it was vital to elevate everything up a level in hierarchy. This meant removing the concept of tabs entirely.
An initial discovery during our research found that a great many users stuck to the default placement of tabs and panels. What that meant in terms of design was that we could have a layout that favored the left and bottom panel.
Since tabs were removed and Revu 2018 now just had panels, accessing those previously hidden features became as easy as a single click. This not only increased the efficiency of using Revu for our users, it decreased many of the time-consuming and redundant how-to and where-is questions Bluebeam’s sales and support teams received.