In order to build a new app, we needed to understand who would be using OneFile's E-Portfolio and how the service is provided, so we set about interviewing customers, stakeholders, call centre, account managers and the business to help us understand the needs and goals of their users as well as their customers and the business goals.
Creating the scope of the app and its impact on the business, we widened the discovery to the extend of every department, creating a service blueprint, user journey maps and identifying core pain points.
After a fair amount of research we soon realised the company as a whole never defined the product personas so making sure all the team were speaking the same language was essential. Workshops were arranged and empathy maps were created along with defining personas for the product.
Creating these customer profiles impacted how requirements were gathered and communicated, improving product development, changing the company culture towards UX and sprouting the businesses understanding of how user needs impacts the products success.
Once we understood our clients needs, our personas and company goals, the product became clear and as a team we crafted the vision. This carried us through great ux decisions every day and supported the product roadmap. Some of the main objectives included but were not limited to:
- Service design
- Client onboarding time reduction and overall improvement
- Customer service and call centre support
- App permissions and account
- Improved UX and UI
- User dashboard
- Cross platform (iOS, Android, Windows)
- Bridging the gap between desktop and mobile.
- New feature set
Sketching, like for many other ux designers, is a huge part of my ux process and only with all the prior groundwork does actual prototyping take place. With the company being so new to UX, these processes were quite tough to implement but a huge success in the results and clarity they brought to different departments. It also unearthed other missing parts of the puzzle.
With the rapid growth of the company, handing over of graphic material to developers needed to be a swifter, more seamless process. Creating a design system would be an advantage to the whole company. Here is a little peak at the living style guide...
Design SystemFar far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. A small river named Duden flows by their place and supplies it with the necessary regelialia
With OneFile being quite new to UX and product testing, we had limited tools available so our primary form of testing was with actual customers. We found they were really engaged, invested and happy to be part of building OneFile's app so creating these focus groups were ideal to enable constant usability testing sessions.
The existing app and being such a complex product, research showed that users were confused with the navigation and workflow, there was no visual hierarchy which produced a low task success rate, the number of tech support calls were high and users struggled logging in. In addition and as a result, account managers were spending 300% longer to onboard customers. Navigating the app for the scale of literacy of different users caused discrepancies in creating a unified workflow.
Having improved the user experience and brining more delight to the new OneFile app, we reduced user pain points, call centre contacts and time to onboard clients on-site, enabling account managers to focus further on increasing sales. The changes to the app increased the product offering to future clients and positioned OneFile better in the online portfolio market against competitors, followed by winning the Queens Award for Innovation!
The OneFile app brought all kinds of challenges but it was exciting to be part of growing the UX capability and helping to change the UX culture and how the business thought of integrating users into their products.
Some of the hurdles we overcame were: