Designing an SME offering
that reduced complexity
A successful deployment of a design-thinking process
The Project
Role - Lead Designer
Timeline - 4-months | 8-Sprints
Skills - Discovery-research | Design-planning | User-studies | Prototyping | Usability-testing | Design-system | Design-Delivery
Overview - Re-working the existing ‘Corporate’ product offering to fit the needs of the small-medium-enterprise (SME) persona.
Constraints
Designed for the customer, not the user…
The existing corporate offering heavily reflected the needs and requirements of an existing customer.
The product lacked attention to hierarchy or workflows.
Technical reluctance…
A ‘scrap and rebuild’ approach was off the table. Informed and considered UI layering would need to work with existing APIs.
The Challenge
How could I influence a new team-approach to design that would see discovery activities being built in to existing processes, to help us understand the key user problems, before any build took place.
Proving a business value on these activities, within an pre-determined 8-Sprint timeline was also highly desirable.
The Approach
Influencing Sprint-planning…
As a new-addition to the squad makeup, I focused in on securing time in the Sprint activities for explorative research activities to take place.
This also presented the perfect opportunity to sell the value of having user-centred-design-approach to the problem we were tackling, to the team.
Testing the existing offering…
Working with the user-researcher, we devised a testing plan for the existing product.
Takeaways:
The product had multiple usability issues on the component and end-to-end task levels
All user struggled to complete the task without severe prompting.
Users claimed ‘they weren’t confident’ in using the product
Understanding the target-user’s needs…
Alongside the usability testing, we held interviews with the users to understand their businesses, their processes and where ‘user-management’ played a part in their day-to-day operations.
Takeaways:
They typical persona used this tool 2-3 times a year, unless staffing factors dictated otherwise
The product was used more in an onboarding of new staff context, rather than having a day-to-day dependancy on it
Iterate. Test. Repeat…
With insights gathered to make informed assumptions, I started devising potential solutions and prototyping the strongest concepts for usability testing.
Takeaways:
A quick-win approach to tweaking the existing UI - as assumed - didn’t solve the right issues for the users
Greater testing success was achieved when the users was presented with a concept that reframed the UI and its key calls-to-action
The Outcome
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Impact
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