As an Agile team we were tasked with a job to redesign and reengineering a customer care platform. I was design lead, but also worked with a UX researcher. In 6 months we created a phase one of the applications that is getting rolled out to new clients, while the older platform is still in use with existing clients. A challenging task for the developers in connecting to legacy systems that had to stay operational while also creating a new application.
LEAD UI/UX designer, working in an agile Team with developers and external Product Owner. Working with another UX designer during research phase. Ux research, & visual design
6th Months, 6 Agile Team, PO
Figma (Wireframes, and UI design) Adobe Illustrator cc/ Photoshop.
PROCESS:
Wire framing, User Journeys, User Interviews, Visual Design
This project spring from a technology issue the client was having that was effecting scalability. The existing application for call centre’s agents, needed to be rebuild as the technology stack was limiting how the system could grow. So that was the first driver the second was that the ui was outdated and the application had been growing in a piecemeal fashion for a number of years. It was thought to take this opportunity to not just rebuild but to also look at the interface and user experience.
So the challenge was that our client had a piece of software that couldn’t scale that was the number one challenge, the second challenge was because the interface was quite old we needed to update it and to address all the technical legacy issues. Another challenge was that the system deals with a lot of third-party plugins and it also sells to particular groups which each have their own needs.
We started by doing some market research, to find out the state of the industry, best practices within this industry and the direct competition. Then we approached one of the main clients to do some user interviews with the agents. We found some very interesting insights, that directly effected how we approached the wire-framing, these power users basically wanted as much screen space as possible as some of the third party application that they had to deal with were very informational dense.
We ran a series of workshops with the various stakeholders to identify the-user flows and various needs of the redesigned system. When your dealing with legacy systems there seems to be a lot of decisions made that the reason behind gets lost and therefor some intense investigation, and robust feature debate was needed in order to get a handle on the project scope.
One of the things we identified was the various personas involved with the application, as on top of the user persona there was a buyer persona, two tiers of users, junior and advanced, independent buyers and manager personas. We did workshopping around the creation of the personas to get a better understand the needs of the users involved.
The visual design part of this project was unusual as a brand redesign was being developed by another party. So a design light version was created, a V0.1 that most likely would be redone when a new brand guide was available. So we worked with the existing brand on a light colour scheme, we focused instead on a lot of investigation on micro interactions, blank states and loading animation screens.
The other element that we did research was on avatars, trying to get a gender neutral but friendly, consistence style.
So in figma we came across a comprehensive style guide / pattern library and started developing it up for this project, so we would have a single point of truth for the front end developers, and where the new brand changes could be implemented. How we thought it would work is that the v1 of the style guide eg the wireframes would get swapped out as the design gets updated components, so the wireframe turns into high fidelity design.
This was an interesting project, not least because of the technology stack, but also because design for power users is a very interesting area to work on, any aspect that slows the system can really add to problems for this type of user.
I enjoyed these realisations and working on an application that is someones job added an extra sense of the weight to the responsibility of not getting it wrong!
