Challenge 

The current Request Center functionality is non-personalized, and limited in functionality and accessibility once logged into the Xcelerate solutions. In addition, RC was not intuitive and or doesn’t provide a consistent user experience as desired.  

Approach

Online research, UX Focus Group, Testing

Role, scope, and constraints

What was your role? UX Lead
What was the timeline of the project? 4 months
What were the platforms or constraints? This project had a shortened time frame to research, explore solutions, test, and then define. Due to that, we were not able to implement everything that would have made this a better experience for the user.

Results

With the ability to demonstrate the new functionality while developing in tandem the product has been very well received.

The Process

Our UX process took a step forward in this epic so the process was better defined, implemented, reflected our future process.

With this epic the following process was used:
Understand: Used internal focus and external focus groups to understand the challenges
Research: Analyzed internal data, researched best practices for help centers which directly influenced the first several rounds of design.
Design: Used data and UI research to develop several LF prototypes. These prototypes were showcased for feedback with the internal and external UX focus group.   
Risen and Repeat: Using the feedback from the focus groups we further refined the acceptance criteria and design in tandem with development cycles.
User Testing: Using a 4 phased release approach in the design and development process we were able to test functionality to a smaller set of users who tested, reviewed, and provided valuable feedback.

The Research

What did you do?
I lead conversations with internal SMEs and the newly formed external UX focus group to understand what the requirements were for adding, editing, and working on a request. 

Using online resources also reinforced internal design decisions with the focus group. These design decisions however we not taken up for development and we have since received feedback that it would have been made easier. 

What was the result?
Even though the optimum solution was not developed the UI reflects direct user feedback to make the UI easy to navigate, approve, check on and modify requests. This reduces internal processes freeing up valuable resources for other customer-related projects.