The context
On June 17′ I made a big change in my career. I joined Vlocity as a Lead UX Architect onsite on Telecom Argentina, where we would take this huge whale to the cloud.
The client wanted to turn off their legacy systems and upload the entire company to the cloud with a big deployment strategy followed by the target of a quadruple play offering to their customers (mobile, Internet, fixed line, and media content).
The challenge
In this project the perception of UX was more aligned to be graphic design while in reality, our role was better focused to understand the business goals, helping the Scrum teams in their stories definition, designing the experience and testing it with end users.
This project was intended to create a suitable solution for both, internal and external users. Internal users were the call center agents and the people who provided customer support in physical stores all over the country. The external users were the clients that accessed via Web or the mobile app.
In any design or decision making position, knowing the context before taking any action is the key to success. To better understand the situation, we needed to discover:
- The business rules and goals
- The user needs and behavior
- Technology and product constraints
Plus, the majority of people didn’t know exactly what was our job here, so selling the discipline across a low digital organization became a big challenge.
Solution and approach
1. Early Stage: The discovery
I started to ask for KPIs the company was measuring and any kind of documentation related to the yearly/quarterly performance to understand where were we standing. Knowing our client’s business was crucial to later define design patterns, tone & voice, and user flows.
This study led to a gold mine of information:
- The market challenges
- The business plans and products offering
- The most profitable products
- Types of user personas
- The competitor’s performance, strengths, and weaknesses
After knowing the business, we continued the discovery by focusing on the user. We went to the call centers and performed different methodologies to gather insights into the day-to-day scenarios the internal users had.
- Call center hearing — on the field
- 1 on 1 Interviews
- Focus groups
- Prototype user testing
We crafted an interview to empathize with the user and have a deeper understanding of the situation, the main goals were:
- Which are the main gaps in today’s applications that we could cover?
- Which are good features that we want to keep?
- Find if we are missing any key feature that the user will lose.
- Understand the current workflow.
- Understand the different roles in the company and the tasks they perform.
- Get to know better our core user profile.
- Understand the user technological barriers.
We conducted 10 interview rounds with different users segmented by:
- Age
- Time in the company
- Business products they managed
After a few visits, using RealtimeBoard we started to classify all the raw feedback we had in five major categories:
- Facts: Key information to understand the user context.
- Paint points: Not desired situations that affect the experience in a negative way (ie. performance).
- Bliss points: Situations that affect the experience in a positive way (ie. a feature they liked).
- Workarounds: Alternative paths they take to resolve a need not covered by the existing tool.
- Ideas: Spontaneous solutions that the users might bring to the table from their point of view.
To improve the results readability, we created categories inside each finding type and created a bubble diagram to detect the strongest points:
2. Mid Stage: Building a solid ground
Once we had our research insights ready, we socialized them to management in the alignment meetings, this was key to demonstrate that we were taking wrong decisions due to lack of understanding of the real situation. From our research, we had specific actions to change interfaces, user flows, and business focus.
With all this knowledge in our back, we were able to prove the real value of having UX in a team, moving from a pixel pusher role to an ideation partner.
We started getting more involved in the scrums during planning and grooming phases, speaking in the name of the user and facilitating the user stories writing with the product owners.
For our internal use, I created a sketch template with all the components in nested symbols, this improved a lot our team delivery turn around and we were able to better focus on the journeys more than the look and feel, which really made a big difference. By using this template, we were able to deliver early prototypes with InVision and bring to the table tangible solutions during the user story definitions. Our value as team members in the Scrums was growing and growing.
Team activities
Another initiative we took to get people on board was to organize workshops to dissolve big rocks along the way. One of the most interesting ones was focused to define the best solution for the desktop and mobile website. To give a starting point, we introduced:
- User Personas
- Mobile / Desktop traffic metrics
- Technology constraints
This was the activity proposed:
- 3 people groups: PO + IT + UX
- Task: Design a mobile-first services web
- Methodology: Paper prototyping
- Share designs, unify points in common, get to a final design
- Set direction and next steps
3. Late Stage: Maintaining an scalable solution
The insights gathered during the discovery phase were just a starting point in the definition of the real needs of the different users. With the help of an external consultant agency specialized in user research, we had scheduled a chronogram of usability tests that would redefine the product.
Focusing on the business, the interface we designed was prepared to meet the company future offerings that will include a significant amount of products, each one with unique logic. The predominant information from a mobile line could be usage, but a fixed internet connection might be when is the next billing going to impact. Discovering all the different scenarios for a huge company like Telecom was without a doubt the biggest challenge in this project.
Looking at the future
Since we were assigned as consultants in this project, we had a deadline which was opposite to the logical UX implementation where the iterate/ measure/feedback cycle is infinite. Therefore our role had also a different meaning for our client.
Our real value was to change the company culture, shifting from an IT centered design to a user-centric design. By interacting every day with all the stakeholders of the company and selling the discipline value, we were able to change the thinking process in the stories definition. The research insights and the workshops had a great impact on the product owners and developers, something that will last in the company forever.
“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”
