Client Requirements

The enterprise planned the search system migration during FY14 and tasked the EA team with conducting market research and defining the UX requirements for the future state.

Solution

Developed the Enterprise Search strategy by evaluating the existing solution and analyzing market trends to establish future-state principles. These principles included: Integrated Search, Instant Results, Dynamic Navigation, Application Search, Personalization, Actionable Results, Knowledge Graph Integration, Enhanced Tools, Mobile Enablement, Error Prevention, Search Scope Definition, and UX Metrics.

Each future-state principle was paired with a detailed design concept, illustrating how it would manifest in the user interface based on search behavior.

After defining the principles and creating the designs, the Enterprise Architecture UX team conducted multiple workshops with various lines of business (LOBs) and facilitated surveys to prioritize features for quarterly fiscal year rollouts.

Prior to full implementation, a beta version of the redesigned enterprise search was tested globally in both high-bandwidth and low-bandwidth regions to ensure performance and usability. The backend was built on MarkLogic, while the frontend was designed using the Bootstrap framework.

Enterprise Service Access Pain-points

The Bank provides a wide range of services essential to its effective functioning, incl. supporting and strengthening the Bank group’s primary mission.

The Bank’s service platforms scored very poorly in the OHI survey with majority of the users finding the experience to be fragmented,  inconsistent and were poorly categorized making findability a major pain-point.

Also less than 30% of the services were available on Mobile.

Solution

This roadmap engagement began with clearly defining the goals:

• Centralize and make general services available and traceable in one location.
• Provide a seamless user experience across multiple platforms.
• Streamline and rationalize systems delivering these services.

I facilitated workshops with key user groups, including staff, service providers, vendors, and support teams. After identifying gaps and future-state requirements, we conducted card-sorting activities using OptimalSort to logically group services. These activities included input from actual users, ranging from novice to expert levels, to ensure effective categorization.

As the design team lead, I developed the user experience strategy for the future state, focusing on two primary user groups: users and service providers.

For users, the strategy emphasized:

• A one-stop shop for services.
• Self-service capabilities.
• Contextual help.
• Bundled services.
• Order tracking.
• Omni-channel access.

For service providers, the strategy focused on:

• Building a comprehensive knowledge repository.
• Promoting services effectively.
• Enabling service syndication.
• Ensuring transparency in service delivery.
• Integrating analytics for continuous improvement.

Additionally, a service bot concept was proposed as a virtual assistant to enhance user support and engagement.

Over time, my approach to usability testing has matured to adapt to the unique needs of the institutions and enterprise users I collaborate with. I define a tailored framework to validate the design, structured into the following steps:

Step 1: Mapping Human Needs

• Begin by thoroughly understanding the institution’s mission, vision, and user needs (human needs).
• Document the institution’s short-term and long-term goals.
• Map these insights to relevant UX principles to ensure the design aligns with and addresses user needs effectively.

Step 2: Testing Methodology

• Engage with the application’s stakeholders to outline the testing approach (e.g., in-person or remote sessions) and expected outcomes.
• Discuss infrastructure requirements necessary for testing.
• Share the documented UX principles from the previous phase and explain their application to the current design.
• Collect stakeholder input to include any additional areas of focus during testing.

Step 3: Application Context and Moderator’s Guide

• Understand the purpose of the application and its context within the broader IT or non-IT ecosystem.
• Document key scenarios and create a moderator’s guide, including detailed measurement criteria to evaluate usability.

Step 4: Selecting End Users

• Collaborate with stakeholders to identify user groups for testing, selecting an average of 3–5 users per group.
• Develop a session context template for usability testing and send invitations to participants.

Step 5: Conducting Usability Testing

• Facilitate usability testing sessions, recording them with user consent.
• Document key findings and observations from the sessions.

Step 6: Stakeholder Walkthrough

• Present the findings and high-level recommendations to the application stakeholders.
• For new product rollouts, involve training/learning teams and organizational change management teams in the walkthrough to ensure better alignment with training and learning material development.

This framework ensures a structured, user-centered approach to usability testing while aligning with institutional goals and user needs.

Engagement Goal

This assignment focused on designing a user-centric, personalized, and customizable intranet space that adapts to user behavior, enhances content relevance, and minimizes clutter.

Solution

• Facilitated multiple UX and Joint Application Design (JAD) sessions to define the foundational elements of the future-state enterprise intranet.
• Developed the application based on insights and requirements gathered during the UX and JAD sessions.
• Conducted formative usability testing with end users across diverse demographics to refine the design.

The updated design, prepared for a pilot launch, includes the following features:

• A social intranet that provides access to corporate content and business applications.
• Integration of social capabilities, such as liking, sharing, commenting, subscribing, and tagging content.
• Customization based on organizational roles, with content that evolves dynamically as users engage with the platform.

Client Requirements

The client requirement involved conducting user research, defining requirements, and designing the architecture for an agronomic advisory application.

Solution

Engaged with growers and agronomic advisors across Nebraska to understand their pain points and gather requirements.

Developed a comprehensive agronomic advisory tool integrated with maps, providing satellite imagery of growers' fields along with real-time status updates for each field. The proposed solution's standout feature was the inclusion of time and user management functionalities, offering significant value to the overall system.

In 2013–2014, I was involved in gathering requirements and designing the end-to-end dealer experience for one of the largest automobile companies, encompassing the pre-sales, sales, and post-sales (servicing) stages.

Phase 1: Defining the Dealer Pre-Sales and Sales Experience
Designed a seamless and consistent experience for dealers across various channels, incorporating two key products to enhance pre-sales and sales processes.

• Product 1: Dealer App

  • Enabled sales personnel to access the product catalog anytime, anywhere.
  • Designed as a native iPad app with a desktop-enhanced website.
  • Allowed dealers to market and sell vehicles remotely, providing potential buyers with a virtual car tour. Buyers could explore engine variants, interior/exterior colors, and features interactively.
  • Integrated inventory details, helping dealers inform buyers about the availability of their chosen vehicle.
  • Included functionality for transitioning to Product 2 to explore pricing incentives for interested buyers.

• Product 2: Incentive System

  • Offered a web-based platform for dealers to access incentives for specific makes and models, as well as generic offers like cashback certificates or 0% financing.
  • Provided incentives based on dealership performance, market share of the make/model, repeat customer loyalty points, and other factors.
  • Helped dealers optimize sales deals by leveraging applicable incentives.

Phase 2: Parts Order System
Developed a system to support post-sales service by enabling dealerships to order OEM car parts and accessories.

• Provided functionality for placing orders, obtaining delivery estimates and pricing, and tracking shipment status.
• Streamlined parts and accessories procurement to improve after-sales service efficiency.

Client Requirements

The Bank managed approximately 10 system profiles per user, which were both expensive to maintain and challenging to migrate or retire. The objective was to unify and rationalize these multiple profile pages along with their data sources while achieving a consensus on a solution that would satisfy all stakeholders across the three institutions under the Bank's umbrella.

Solution

As part of the Enterprise Architecture (EA) UX team, I co-facilitated a design studio with the following objectives:

• Define a common profile for the Bank’s staff, referred to as the “Universal Employee Profile (UEP),” designed to be agnostic of people, processes, and systems.
• Recommend the best approach for implementing the UEP within the Bank.

Design Studio Output:
The key recommendation was to maintain a single, unified profile for each user. This profile would include both skill-related and social activity content, enabling the organization to leverage informal and strategic knowledge. By building comprehensive profiles with endorsed knowledge and skill maps, the organization can facilitate expert identification.

Key Deliverables:

• Defined the Universal Employee Profile (UEP) structure, with attributes grouped under distinct categories.
• Established access levels for each attribute (Public, Private, Limited).
• Identified and validated the consumers of the unified profile.
• Determined and rationalized the data sources for UEP attributes.