Michael Wood

QA Sales Calculator Lead User Experience (Contract)

Brief

Make an ad hoc system of Excel Documents and Emails into a cloud based application for Sales People to use every day.

My Contributions

• Research & Discover
• Ideation
• Information Architecture
• Service Design
• Product Design
• Visual Design
• Interaction Design
• Front End Development

Project Team

• Michael Wood User Experience
• Barry Product Management
• Les Back End Development
• Beth Testing
• Andy Development Manager

Process Overview

• Research
• Analysis
• Wireframing
• Front End Development
• Wireframing
• Front End Development
• Back End Development
• Testing
• Refinement

Research & Discover

With the remit of the project already defined, I could focus on finding areas of for significant improvements.

To do this, I interviewed users one-to-one. This allowed them to discuss freely the problems they had on a day-to-day basis. These interviews were anonymous and private to allow sales people to talk about "tricks of the trade" which, strictly speaking, might not be that the company wanted but were needed in order to hit personal sales targets.

To get a from-the-ground view, I brought the administrators of the current system into the design process when mapping out what the new app would do. This surfaced a gap between what the organisation believed the system was doing, and how it was working in practice, which allowed us to create a target to aim for. Having the experience of those administrators was crucial for that.

In addition, I ran an analysis of the data generated by the system and identified curios within that data which might suggest problems. The correlation between the availability of a manager to sign off a sale immediately and the value of those sales is a good example of this analysis.

Key Insights

Sales People found that temporal lag in the system added a costly overhead to their work, hampering their chances of meeting targets.

Managers found it difficult to approve sales because pertinent information was not presented clearly and in an easily accessible way.

Given that the system ran through emailed Excel documents, Administrators found the system difficult to manage and the lags in the system caused sales based on out of date information.

Problem Statement

Sales Team Members looking to have larger discounts approved by Managers have to have those discounts approved by managers. Wen those managers were not in direct contact with the system, those approvals were difficult to process. This was a problem because it prevented sales being finalised until the Manager was in contact, which could lead to a loss of the sale.

Sales Team Members would create a sale on the basis of information carried in the Excel based system, only for that those values to change. This was a problem as it would cause the Sales Team Member to have to renegotiate the sale, which could lead to a loss of that sale.

Sales Team Members who were making a sale on the basis of another Team Member had no context or information about the customer for the sale. This was an issue as it could cause them to attempt to re-sell the customer on something they had previously rejected, wasting time and putting the sale in danger.

Ideation Phase

• Define three groups of stakeholders: Sales People, Managers and System Administrators.
• Map out the journeys for those three groups, analysing tasks they carried out, and finding pain points.
• Card sorting and collaborative user story creation.
• Wireframes, prototypes.

The Concept

If we put this system into the cloud, we make it quicker to use, and we can leverage that speed into a more up-to-date system. We can also add a few usability features, which a two-way connection to the database will allow us to do.

Convincer

• Convincer & Personas.

Wireframes

• The Sales Calculator grew out of a wider dashboard which started in these prototypes.
• The idea was to deliver information as quickly as possible.
• Stakeholders quickly started to want to play with working prototypes, and so the process moved quickly away from Wireframes.

Prototype

• Prototype Early Working Prototype
• Sales Calculator Early Working Prototype

Visual Designs

• The visual designs of the dashboard for the Sales Calculator.
• Drilling into a sale shows the clarity and simplicity we wanted.
• A sale is a complicated set of elements, and a roll up system allowed for this.

User Testing

• I built a metric around response times between request and approval - dubbed "The Golf Course Test" - to measure effectiveness.
• I monitored reports from the Administrators on the nature of problems reported to them, looking for iterative improvements for the system.
• I returned to the Sales People with the user journeys we had collaborated on. These interviews allowed us to look at our shared aims and see if we had reached them, and feed that back into the process.

Features

• New interface, to take the best of the previous system while improving it.
• Cross device, to allow for mobile use

Outcome

A cloud based App which was accessible from anywhere, was faster to use, and that cut the update loop from being days to being instant.

Final Thoughts

Much of user experience is about finding the right thing to do with limited resources, and part of finding that is collaboration with stakeholders to understand their problem. To do that, the right metaphors can be useful. The term "Golf Course Test" allowed everyone to see the benefits of this work in practice.