Overview
I was part of the Colleague Experience Team of a tech company as a UX designer. We as a team partnered with IT, HR and different BU's to improve colleague engagement, satisfaction and productivity. I collaborated mainly with the Sales Team on various tools they used in their day to day work in order to streamline their workflow, increase productivity (thus increasing the sales and revenue for the whole company), reduce time on the daily tasks and increase the overall satisfaction with the products. Described here are some of my contributions.
Analytics tool redesign
Analytics tool redesign
Commerce Capabilities Analytics aimed to deliver a single platform of integrated descriptive, diagnostic and predictive analytics capabilities to monitor the performance of various commerce products to understand what's working well, diagnose problems, determine potential root causes and optimize business outcomes in future so as to make the SaaS and Subscription business model transformation of the company more successful.
The need for redesign came from users' feedback showing their frustration when interacting with the platform as it did not match their existing mental model for how a company analytics tool should be structured (a more widely used tool has been referred to many times in the feedback).
When analysing the current tool I came across several usability issues like inconsistent filters, navigation that was hard to notice, buttons that did not look like buttons and had confusing call to action and I added new functions to better the user experience like the ability to reset filters, an easy way to go back to the landing page through a direct button in the top nav bar and I upped the overall look and feel of the platform by implementing the company design system, using more appealing illustrations instead of the inconsistent and outdated icons on the landing page and using an accessibility-proofed colour palette. I also suggested better data visualisation for certain dashboards that were problematic.
I implemented a colour palette based on the company design system that my colleague developed for a similar analytics tool in an effort to unify the tools that the sales team used throughout the company. The colours were checked for any accessibility issues (contrast, different visual impairments like colour blindness etc.)
Analytics app design evaluation and improvement
Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) mobile app was used to view analytical information of a customer in the cases when there were no other way to access the data (for example a sales representative is meeting with a customer without having a laptop). It contained an overall view of a customers vital statistics and provided important data at a glance. Our team was initially contacted for helping with adding a new feature for the tool at a later stage of the app development - the heat map shown below, but after a discussion that we had to become a strategic partner to the analytics team I proactively decided to propose a roadmap for future improvements to the app with them.
I started with structuring the information we had so far for the project as part of a slide deck presentation where I outlined the product current state, future vision, the user group we were designing for, their main pain points that had come up during the research that had been conducted, considerations and a timeline.
Who are we designing for?
Top three executive users' pain points
Our research team had conducted interviews with the executive VP users and most common/consistent challenges reported by users so far and opportunities for improvement were determined :
Considerations
Persona needs:
Experiences and features could fail if User needs are not meet. The goal is to establish and measure what are the Business goals and User's needs.
Alignment with desktop platform:
- There were major efforts for improving the SJA desktop experience and heuristic analysis was already underway which may affect the mobile app.
- There were efforts to improve the colour palettes for charts and dashboards for the desktop platform.
Alignment with native elements for iOS and Android
Based on the information that we had gathered so far I compiled a timeline with the next steps I considered necessary to evaluate and redesign the current mobile experience.
Shuttle app design
In order to ensure the safety of it's employees and be compliant with local laws the Company needed a way to track every employee's usage of the company shuttle. A solution to gather the shuttle information was to be designed for the target user group of the regular employees. I used the Design Thinking methodology to come up with the solution.
After interviewing several employees of the company I put up an archetypal persona in order to empathise with the users and their problems. It also helped me compile an empathy map. An interesting insight was that as employees were using their office card to check into the shuttles they did not see the need to use another validation method. Also at the dedicated office days there might be too many people wanting to use a single shuttle so a problem with finding a seat may occur. Moreover there was the problem with people not having an easy access to the schedule information as it was located somewhere in the myriad of the company web platforms.
The empathy mapping and user interviews helped a lot with the problem definition that was to create an easy way to collect employee shuttle information for a great amount of employees distributed in multiple countries that would be also beneficial to the people so that they have an incentive to use the given solution.
As part of the ideation process I made a list of the main pain points and desires that came from the research and brief in order to define features that can be part of the subsequent product.
I also did a mind map to organise the information and track the user flow.
Here are some of the screens I designed for the app that include an easy to find schedule, ability to define a destination, reserve a seat and select date & time and a virtual company card (no more problems with a forgotten card!)
I also planned for validation of the app design by performing usability tests in order to observe representative users of the products while they use it and evaluate their experiences and interactions. The users tested would be around 3-5 employees in small iterative studies to maximise cost and benefit. Ethnographic studies could also be performed in order to observe the participants using the products in their natural everyday setting.
Salesforce platform
I worked on an instance of the Salesforce platform tailored for our company. This is a platform that provides customer relationship management, focusing on sales, customer service, analytics etc. Me along with the product team, the PMs and engineers, were improving existing features and adding new capabilities so as to streamline the sales team work, reduce their time on task and task completion rate. One such improvement was getting rid of a sub-tabs sections withing a tab and replacing with expandable sections that you can scroll through. This aimed to increase the speed of filling in all the mandatory fields and reduce the omission of such fields by mistake.
In order to validate the design we run a survey in the sales team slack channel to inquire about their overall perception of the new expandable sections and whether they felt that they were easier and faster to navigate. The results were in favor of the redesign and proved that we made the right decision.
There was a lot of research effort concerning the platform and our team highlighted areas in need of improvement and what generally caused frustration in the users. All our work was as part of a strategy to improve the platform gradually in the future.
Sales feedback platform improvements
There was a need for a sales app with a feedback feature to have it's feedback filter redesigned because of the users' frustration with the filter's bad usability. Our team's user research showed the following pain points and possibilities for improvement:
- Most users shared that they find the amount of filters overwhelming and perceive the general search action to be the fastest method. (Option to reduce the number of filters or show them by order of priority).
- Most users shared that they find the amount of filters overwhelming and perceive the general search action to be the fastest method. (Option to reduce the number of filters or show them by order of priority).
- Top 10 by Geo and Filter section creates noise and colleagues need to be able to tailor information to their needs (Option to expand/collapse sections).
- Colleagues need to be able to filter the feedback by the status of their request – this information is typically forwarded to their customers and currently increases their manual workload (Option to filter by status).
Problems
I conducted design evaluation of the current filter state and there were several problematic areas - inconsistent buttons and actions, dropdown menus etc.
Solutions
Important design changes made were:
- Use progressive disclosure for the filters as opposed to seeing all the options at once which heightens the cognitive load of the user. We also discussed with the Product Owner that there should be reducing of the filters in general and prioritizing by showing the most important filters first and then disclosing the additional filters.
- Use progressive disclosure for the filters as opposed to seeing all the options at once which heightens the cognitive load of the user. We also discussed with the Product Owner that there should be reducing of the filters in general and prioritizing by showing the most important filters first and then disclosing the additional filters.
- Unification of the buttons
- Adding clear filter option at the bottom so as to easily reset all selected filters and putting the bottom buttons on a sticky bar so that they are visually present at all times on the screen (filter content is scrollable).
- Based on the research findings I made the top five filter options collapsible in order to declutter and free space.
- I also unified all multi select drop downs as they were inconsistent in the original design.
In order to aid this unification I prepared a thorough list of all field types.
Further collaboration
After the filter redesign effort the product team was quite happy with the results so they started reaching out to me regularly when they needed UX support. One such case was adding a subscription function so that a user (a manager in this case) can be informed about new tickets in a pre-saved category.
Conclusion
During my tenure at the company I worked closely with our research team, followed established team processes (double diamond, design thinking), I collaborated with product owners and project managers of different product teams as well as engineering teams. There was great professionalism on every level and I am glad I managed to contribute in this cross functional collaboration. I also participated in our team's efforts to share knowledge about UX and design with the rest of the company and thus further raise its UX maturity.
Thank you!
