Being the voice of the user
Understanding user needs to map out a new service model and interface
Google contracted Potato LLC to help them rebuild an internal service to manage a two-day shipping consumer service, Fulfilled by Google. I and my team went from zero to delivering a visually simplified and focused administrative interface that reduced operator stress, time to identify and mitigate issues, and overall issues in delivery of customer goods.
With another designer on my team, I mapped out the actors and processes in the entire system, from customers ordering a product online to receiving it, with all the actors and systems that worked in a complex interchange of data and objects (top two images).
From our user research with operators, we had learned that operators needed to examine every shipping object at every stage and manually confirm every step with shipping, storage, and 3PL parties.
This allowed me to build a service blueprint (third image) that uncovered where critical communications needed to occur, including signals that one of these was received and is being acted on. This allowed me to propose that the existing interface, which exposed the entire backend data about every object, was not necessary. What if we oriented the interface to expose only the data that operators needed?
With that user-centered and data-centered mindset, my team and I were able to design, test, and build an interface model that freed the operators from seeing hundreds, if not thousands, of items in the system in a table format. Instead, the system could present them with views into the complex data, showing them relevant information that applied to their main workflows: monitoring the status of an item in the system, mitigating an issue in the system, and monitoring the overall health of the system,
As a result, in testing, we saw operators report much lower stress levels, reduced time and effort to address issues, and a much lower operator error rate.
Discovering user needs and mental models with UXR
As a contact Product Designer for Clorox Professional, I was tasked with redesigning their professional web site to add a new product family. Advocating for user research led to new insights that made the client excited about a full redesign that more closely met the mental model of users. This resulted in reduced user frustration, higher sales for Clorox nationwide, and the design of a new mobile app that reduced the workload of Clorox field sales reps while improving sales.
I learned that this site was organized to represent marketing families; the site mirrored the company structure, and did not represent mental models of how users might look for products. This meant that users seeking similar products for similar uses would have to navigate two or three clicks from the home page for one product, back to the home page, and then more clicks down a different path. My hypothesis was that this could make it hard for users to find and compare.
Though the client was unfamiliar with user research, I advocated for usability testing with a sample of their target users first. I created testing protocols, explained the process to the stakeholders, and conducted remote and in-person tests using screen recorders.
The tests did reveal a high task failure rate and a high degree of frustration when regular users of the site were asked to find and compare products that they used on a regular basis. The image of one user being frustrated (right) prompted one major stakeholder to state they had no idea their site was difficult to use and drove alignment for reorganizing the IA of the site.
This opened up the project for a more deep redesign. I created filter and search affordances based on how users thought of and categorized products: what type of product, where it can be used, what it can kill. Subsequent testing showed an over 80% drop in task failure rates.
The resulting site was so successful with users and the stakeholders that I was engaged to bring that design to the Clorox TouchPoint mobile app for Clorox field reps.
Understanding user needs to map out a new service model and interface
Google contracted Potato LLC to help them rebuild an internal service to manage a two-day shipping consumer service, Fulfilled by Google. I and my team went from zero to delivering a visually simplified and focused administrative interface that reduced operator stress, time to identify and mitigate issues, and overall issues in delivery of customer goods.
With another designer on my team, I mapped out the actors and processes in the entire system, from customers ordering a product online to receiving it, with all the actors and systems that worked in a complex interchange of data and objects (top two images).
From our user research with operators, we had learned that operators needed to examine every shipping object at every stage and manually confirm every step with shipping, storage, and 3PL parties.
This allowed me to build a service blueprint (third image) that uncovered where critical communications needed to occur, including signals that one of these was received and is being acted on. This allowed me to propose that the existing interface, which exposed the entire backend data about every object, was not necessary. What if we oriented the interface to expose only the data that operators needed?
With that user-centered and data-centered mindset, my team and I were able to design, test, and build an interface model that freed the operators from seeing hundreds, if not thousands, of items in the system in a table format. Instead, the system could present them with views into the complex data, showing them relevant information that applied to their main workflows: monitoring the status of an item in the system, mitigating an issue in the system, and monitoring the overall health of the system,
As a result, in testing, we saw operators report much lower stress levels, reduced time and effort to address issues, and a much lower operator error rate.