Business management platform | web app
User Research, Design Sprint, Product design
my role: UX Designer
project size: 12 people; Business Team, Development Team and myself.
Introduction
Our client runs a small department of around 8 people. Their department is in charge of a pioneer program that will incentivize participating employers who have a higher standard for workplace health and safety. Their core operation is to determine the eligibility of the employers and to process the incentive payments.
However, the legacy system was built 20 years ago, it is outdated and cannot keep up with the client’s increasing demand. The client approached us looking for a solution.
My contribution
Lead end-to-end design life cycle from the discovery phase to product launch.
Facilitated co-design workshop to discover competing solutions.
Created sophisticated prototypes for usability testing to validate ideas with the client through an iterative process.
The very first meeting with the PM – UX Strategy Alignment
I sat down with the Project Manager to come up with a UX strategy that fits the project timeline. Before the meeting, I prepared a high-level Design Roadmap to explain my process and the steps required for the product design. It helped the PM to estimate the time needed for the discovery, design and validation phases of the project. As a result, I got full support from the PM to value UX input and use a customer-centered design approach. We agreed to do some initial discovery sessions with the customer and I will host a design-thinking workshop to co-create with different stakeholders.
For the discovery phase, I requested to join most of the meetings so I could understand our client’s workflow and how they used the old system. That helped me to develop empathy with the user. As we started to be more familiar with the business workflow, I worked with the PM to define some success metrics. Our target was to improve the incentive processing amount and processing speed by 100%.
Clients were too busy – Design Sprints
The next step for me was to plan and facilitate the co-creation workshop. I nailed down the invitation list to include 2 stakeholders from the client, PM, PO and 1 developer. Just as I was about to send out the meeting invitations to our stakeholders, the first challenge arrived. Our clients were extremely busy and cannot attend any meetings anytime soon. It would be crucial for the stakeholders to participate in the Design Sprint workshop because we need to extract meaningful information from them and validate any wrong assumptions. However, the project needed to move forward. As a replacement, I invited one front-end developer, one back-end developer, and one more QA who all had some exposure to the client’s tools. Without key stakeholders’ involvement, it would be very challenging to define the problem, find the goals, map out key journeys, and sketch out potential solutions. During the design sprint workshop, I first invited the Product Owner who was familiar with the client’s business to explain all the key workflows to the whole team. This helped to team to set the scope of the project. As soon as we had the project scope defined, the team became more productive to feed in the workflow details. After some discussions, many sketches, some clear patterns started to form up. All members of the working group were satisfied with the potential solution. We have achieved what we aimed for in the workshop.
Propose design and validate assumptions
I went back to my drawing board to quickly come up with the first draft of the new product’s wireframe and its Information Architecture. After some weekly meetings with the client and many iterations, Low fidelity wireframes turned into low-fidelity prototypes. I validate what was right and corrected what was missing with the customer.
The first sketch was from developers on the team when we were in the design sprint. Followed by some wireframes and mockups.
In order to validate some of the ideas we had brainstormed as a team, I created many sets of prototypes to present the workflow and test with the customer. I received positive feedback from the client as these features solved their pain points. After many iterations, the following is the final work.
Result
The new cloud-based application streamlines the business processes and increases the efficiency of day-to-day operations for the client.
It has processed over $45,100,000 incentives to employers in BC this year. The overall improvement is 10 times better.
Manual approvals are 6 times better. Cases that require manual investigation dropped from 12,000 to 2,000.
Eligibility determination speed is 15 times faster.
Social impact
The new tool empowers the client to effectively manage the program across BC. The new tool empowers our client to effectively manage the program across BC. It saves workers from injury, illness and disease by promoting workplace health and safety.
