Client: American Express
Role: UX Consultant
Year: 2020
Duration: 8 Months
Number of Tracks: 4
Team: 1 consultant, 1 UX Designer, 2 Visual Designers
How it's all Started?
American Express and Infosys were aligned with a series of B2B engineering projects and we had a chance to meet the client on behalf of the project team. During the project discussion and explaining their existing way of processing information through spreadsheets and emails, we realised it's just one of many applications that all come together for managing products. It was an opportunity and we proposed a design solution, which gives better control over their product lineup. The client was open to the initial discussion, POCs and Estimations were presented along with the design approach.
Design Objectives
The initial kickoff meeting with all the stockholders were organised and discussed the project scopes and other opportunities, which gave us the clarity on the design objectives. Which are,
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Transforming the traditional process to a digital platform through a dedicated web portal.
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Reducing time consumption for new product release by establishing a seamless approval process.
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Simplify the task flow to an extent which are easy to understand and shortens the learning curve.
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Making the Web portal as One stop solution for all future products and other similar projects.
My Role
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Client handling, collaborating with different stakeholders and conducting UX workshops.
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Defining UX strategies, delivering design concepts and iterating the solution.
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Rapid prototyping and Usability testing.
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Managing Visual design and deliverables.
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Project pitching, creating and presenting POCs &Estimations.
Stakeholder Workshops
Interviews:
I have conducted interviews with user groups who are majorly from different parts of the UK and a few from Europe and America. Our questions are mainly focused on their routine and how they are managing tasks in a different context. Based on the insights from interviews, we have created an initial user story and presented it to stakeholders.
White-boarding:
Online white-boarding was conducted to ensure and refine the user stories, which gave us a better understanding of pain points, actual user groups and the context of the problem. This helped us to develop a High-level Information architecture and a user flow is what we call a ‘happy path’— a simplified version of the user flow was a successful outcome.
User Groups
Customer Leads
Product Managers
Nitish kumar
Facing customer requests and working on credit and debit adjustments is the main activity. He holds the access to create and edit the products.
"Due to cascading effect, even small changes take a long time to serve the customer ."
Elena
Monitoring the Customer leads and creating dedicated offers to particular regions or customers. Holds access to comment and modify the new and existing products.
"Since the process is not streamlined, it's time consuming to train a new employees for the task "
Persona
Customer Lead
Project Manager
User journey
Customer Lead
Customer Lead
Project Manager
Task Frequency Matrix
Listed out all the tasks and shared with different user groups, 5 participants are identified and asked to vote for daily tasks. The results are categorised based on How frequently the job is completed? and How important is the task?.
This helps us to narrow down the number of tasks and prioritise the importance; The matrix paves the way for red route identification to map and prioritise user needs and facilitate alignment amongst your stakeholders.
Red Route - Task identification
Information Architecture
Understanding the scale and size and sorting of the content was the most crucial step in this project, due to the sheer amount of data that had to be structured. The content structuring was done with easy consumption in mind. For this, we tried highlighting different information according to the frequency of usage and preference for the tasks. This approach gave us a guiding rule on which the whole site is based. On reviewing the user activity and the feedback on IA, it is safe to say that the approach has fared well for the client.
UX Sitemap
Before starting wireframes, we needed better clarity on the navigation and to simplify the process products and get logical connections between other task flows; The site map was used to group similar contents and We kept the UX site map accessible to everyone working on the project and made it a living document where changes and suggestions are reflected throughout the course. The design was optimised using the "3 click rule" for navigating any pages and five-step progress trackers were introduced to visually distinguish the content units that make sense in the context and to establish the logical flow. It also sets the expectation up front, time and effort tasks to complete the tasks.
Wireframes I
Based on the insights collected in the discovery phase, I have started creating the wireframes and specific nomenclatures are used as a part of UX writing. We explored different layouts, elements, calls-to-action and site navigation. This stage helped us push usability to the forefront and find the proper interactions needed to deliver the core message effectively.
Wireframes II
We refined the assumptions and tested the hypothesis with the wireframes and test outcomes are used to refine the High fidelity wireframes. The cycle was set as part of LeanUX. We iterated the design further until we had satisfying results for the MVPs. The project followed two weeks sprint and the UX team were sprint ahead of the developing team, with the help of clear and iterative wireframes, we could able to communicate and deliver design outputs to the development team.
User Testing
The wireframe was given to different users, who participated in the user interviews, also been asked to test the usability. We asked them to perform 5 various tasks each. The feedbacks were collected and studied to find the main pain points. I’ve made a testing round in order to reveal possible usability problems and received mixed feedback and based on which the wireframes were modified.
Testing Method - Remote Usability Testing
To Understand how user adopts and access the newly designed screens for product management. Due to the location of users and UX team across geographies, the feasible method was a "Remote usability testing" conducted over the WebEx platform.
Test Participants
Homa Alviri
Customer Lead I
Peter Ryan
Project Manager
Nitish Kumar
Customer Lead I
Elena Mackay
Product Manager
Justin Karl
Customer Leads II
Evaluation Task/Scenarios
1. Initiating Change requests by customers.
2. Finalising the requested offer.
3. Initiating New product creation.
4. Creating an Agreement for a new proposal.
5. Connecting appropriate Terms and Conditions.
Task Completion
All participants successfully completed the task 1 & 4 and 3 out of 5 users completed the all the other tasks, thus a completion rate of 80%. Post completion, we requested to share the ratings for the completed task.
Task Rating
The task were rated based on 5-points ranged from 1 (very difficult) to 5 being (very easy).
Time on Task
Task 2 required participants to "Finalise the request offer", which took the longest to complete (mean = 302 seconds/5 minutes). However, completion ranged from 163 seconds (approximately 2 minutes) to 5 minutes at maximum.
Post-Task Overall Questionnaires
We collected feedback about the overall experience of the new design. the results are plotted in the table and used for finalising recommendations
Recommendations
Based on the usability test results, the success rate, behaviours and comments were used to arrive recommendations along with severity ratings.
Visual Design
Landing page specific to products, this where different user can access, some may have restricted but most can navigate for different tasks.
PACE Dashboard which gives access to insights on performance, recent and incomplete works, Daily pending tasks, Resources, Events, News and products.
All the old formates still yet to be digitised and relevant to current product lines can be accessed here, which will help users compare and make informed decisions quickly.
Insights is more useful for the project managers who are handling multiple projects and want to track performance of each and to take necessary actions.
Newsroom and event page to stay updated on daily activities and things happening within the organization
One of multiple product initiation flow designed with voice activated guided journey and comparison view for easy decision making.
Take Away
As a designer, my biggest challenge was convincing and educating the client from the beginning about UX methodologies and how well they can contribute to the project's overall outcome. It was my most significant learning how to keep the stakeholders engaged in design phases. But as you know, client's are always interested in visually appealing works even if it's a wireframe, often I have to send out few UI deliverables to gain trust, and another learning was conducting workshops which are not just testing or gathering information also made it rewarding, that's how I could able to take them through the discovery and ideation faces of the design process.