Our challenge: This large services company had three similar but distinct clients. This project aimed to combine all three clients' services into a single model using user-centred design techniques.
Workshops – stakeholder management – information architecture – user journeys – user research – ethnography
This service company's three clients all had similar aims but different processes. Our client required them to be combined into a single platform to reduce overall cost and increase efficiency. Our job was to elicit the processes (digital and real-world) from all three and combine them into single journeys.
To do this, we engaged subject-matter experts from the clients with regular workshops to elicit their separate processes. The hard work began by trying to combine these collaboratively with the SMEs.
An anonymised photo of a workshop's output
Some of these processes were very complicated indeed and required cooperative work with many people and real-world services (like sending appropriate letters at the correct point, booking travel and accommodation).
This was a challenge because we had to increase efficiency of staff as well as combine processes. We took the opportunity to perform ethnographic research at the clients' offices which informed a keystroke-level GOMS (Goals, Operators, Methods, Selections) task analysis of the existing system. We were able to compare this system with our new proposal to estimate gains in staff efficiency
An anonymised workflow for a single process
Once we'd validated our workflows with the SMEs, the stakeholders and the end-users, we documented them in exhaustive detail just like above (using Omnigraffle). This is one of the more complicated processes but illustrates the level of challenge we faced.
The workflows were passed off to our client's UI designers who created wireframes ready for development. Our workflows also enabled the development teams to begin initial scoping and estimate work accurately for project management.
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