Project three Conversant dashboard image

Conversant access

role

UX Lead: Research & Design

tools

Blackboard, Axure

timeline

2 sprints

year

2017

background

As the UX lead for this project, I was involved with all stages - concept through hi-fi mocks (delivered by UI team). This included attending the kickoff meeting to understand the project at a high level with key stakeholders (business and operations). Followed by the initial requirements gathering, research, and design phases. The lead account manager for the Pre-sales team was my main point of contact on the business side. She  worked  with me to understand their workflow, challenges, and what a win would look like. Technical questions and concerns were run through the product manager.

Problem: Conversant's pre-sales account management team utilizes spreadsheets, email, and phone calls to complete necessary onboarding tasks for new clients.

goals

  • To increase early client adoption and usage of Conversant Access
  • To educate the client with onboarding launch process to allow for earlier client resource allocation and shorter launch timing
  • To provide clients with consistent ongoing launch status and timing updates
  • To provide clients with standardized information sharing among their team.  This will decrease miscommunication during onboarding
  • To provide account management with single point of reference for communicating launch timing, thereby eliminating miscommunication with

process

  1. Discovery & Personas
  2. Research task management products
  3. Outline all of the current pain points
  4. Prototype
  5. Iterate on continuous business feedback
  6. Design final functional prototype in Axure®

discovery

The following are some of the requirements collected from the business during our kickoff meeting:

Outline of the current process with steps and sub-steps.

How the steps on the left would be inputted into an Excel document for onboarding a client.

Pain Points:

  • Time consuming for AM’s to follow up with clients via email and phone to ensure tasks are completed
  • Tasks maintained in a spreadsheet are more prone to erroneous entries
  • Excel docs are not reader friendly
  • Reduced transparency with clients, since they don’t have access to task lists
  • Current asset and documentation delivery is done via email causing bottlenecks
  • Example of high level track (Online Integration), with associated subtasks

Persona

Competitive Analysis

The name “Dashboard” was misleading, as our goal was to design a task management system - tailored to the account managers needs. A dashboard typically provides data visualization for KPIs.Consequently, I focused my research on task oriented features found in project management systems, such as Asana and Trello. After my analysis, we incorporated the following features to improve the workflow for account managers and the pre-sales team:

  • Ensure all ancillary information for subtasks is easy to find - we used valuable real estate in the name column to display the associated documents and assets.
  • Clearly display due dates for high level tracks - we displayed due dates prominently in the high level track cards.
  • Feedback to users is crucial, since tasks are deadline driven - we incorporated status badges at a high level and task level.
  • Utilizing Conversant's notification system will ensure account managers receive real time updates when a client sends a message or uploads files. Client users will receive an email notification.
  • Edit with ease - we utilized an inline editing feature found in other sections in Conversant Access to allow for easy editing of dates.

Early concepts

A few different paths were explored for layouts and design. Keeping in mind the requirements (referenced above), Gantt charts (Concept A) and high level cards (Concept B) were the outcomes - providing the best hierarchy for the tracks and associated subtasks.Concept B was the winner based on our primary users feedback. Ultimately, our primary users and the UX team concluded that the Gantt charts didn't provide any value to managing tasks. The high level track cards were more effective at communicating due dates, warnings, and completed tasks.

final prototype

Using Axure®, the conceptual sketch was turned into a fully functional rapid prototype to review with stakeholders. Due to the uniqueness of this project, we weren't able to utilize many existing components in our Conversant design system -- used for a majority of internal projects. Some of the more noticeable changes from the initial whiteboarding sessions and sketches were:

  • Actions requiring file uploads (document upload/download, creative assets) were moved below the subtask name
  • Comment column was increased in size to allow for lengthier comments
  • AMs requested a download option to view all of the tasks in an Excel doc -- this was added adjacent to the list view and calendar view