Works / Citi DealExpress
A CRM Application
Deal Express.
Client
Citi Bank UK.
Project Overview
Intro
Deal Express is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that helps users turn a lead into a deal and close it. Before putting the deal to a close, users will go through the various phases of the deal and enrich it.
My Role
Senior UX / UI consultant, conducted the research and worked closely with stakeholders and tech team to vet out the problem statement and provide an appropriate design solution.
Goals
Revamp the entier architecture of the application and products to improve the overall experience in all aspects.
Date
April 2017 initially worked at Chennai, India. By Feb 2018 moved to London Citi office to work closely with stakeholders.
Discovery
Research Goals
- Understand the Eco-System of the legacy application.
- Understand the business objectives.
- Mitigate the users pain points and application usability issue.
- Validate assumptions.
Stated Problems
- Long time to close a deal.
- Despite the system, there are lot of manual process involved.
- UI is sluggish and customising each product required too many questions to be answered.
- Application flow is confusing, the interface is not intuitive, and there is little documentation to support users.
Define
Eco System Study
An Eco System was defined by conducting multiple interviews with business stakeholders and regional product owners to plot all contact points of a prospect's deal life cycle and identify how users communicate with various systems and processes.
Empathy Mapping
The mapping exercise aids me in determining the nature of the user and their actions. It also allowed me to see where the core team's understanding of the users was lacking, allowing me to fill in the gaps.
Persona
Based on preliminary interviews with stakeholders and an eco system study, I was able to identify four different key personas who play a significant role in the prospect deal life cycle, as well as one secondary (CS Team) user group.
- TTS Sales.
- Solution Sales.
- Product Sales.
- Account Managers (AM).
- Implementation Managers (IM).
- Activity Approvers.
- Customer Support (CS) Team.
Users Touch Points - Core Functions
Expert Review
Conduct a heuristic evaluation to validate and present the usability and visual problem/pain points discovered during the evaluation, as well as potential solutions. For this evaluation, I was using the '10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design' and recorded all of the violations and potential alternatives on this document.
Product Analysis & Task Flows
There are over 200 products in the CRM application; I began my review by identifying and classifying all products and categories into three major groups based on their user flow and two sub-categories based on their nature. This exercise allows me to focus my attention on the most complex products. It also assisted me in identifying three key products that are essential for deal creation.
Design System
Using a design system allows us to have complete control over the component and application structure design. As a result, we can maintain consistency between applications. We were able to save a significant amount of time in development by integrating the design system into the vendor's standalone application.
Adaptable components created in Adobe XD and Sketch, allowing us to cut signification design time when presenting new solutions and quickly develop a prototype, reducing the need for wireframing in the process.
Challenges & Overcomes
| Challenges | Overcomes |
|---|---|
| Users' voices are never heard by the tech team, and the global product owner speaks for all users. | Multiple presentations were given to educate business stakeholders on why we should connect with users on a regular basis and bridge the gap by conducting periodic surveys and remote walkthroughs to gather feedback from users. |
| There is no documentation to which users can refer to learn more about the products. | Create an internal library called DE university, where documentation for each product is presented, and update the same post-review cycle with appropriate screenshots and refer links. |
| The tech team was divided into groups based on region and vendor, with each following a different pattern of code practise. | By defining a design system with colour standards for accessibility, components. Globalisation of the layout structure and interaction functions improves consistency across the application significantly. |
| Because there were too many questions to answer for each product, increase in number of human errors and the overall progress of a deal was hampered. | Conducted multiple sessions with product owners from across the region to consolidate questions on each product and collaborate with data analysts to vet out the historical trend of data flow, which aids in the development of a system that can prepopulate the majority of the questions on a product. |
| Each product's front end development took nearly four weeks to complete. This causes a delay in overall delivery. | Development team use a standalone SAAS application for front-end development, I learned the tool and spent nearly three months integrating the design system and styling the components directly into the system's core CSS library. Assist in reducing the development effort from weeks to a few days. |
| The system's messages are not human-friendly, which increases the number of calls to the production support team. | Worked with middleware, BAs, and data analysts to vet out system messages, both informative and error, and convert them into human-readable messages. |
Achievementss
47%
customer/production support call got reduced
40%
questions are pre-populated on each product
56%
usability issues are reduced across the board
68%
human errors are reduced across the application
43%
the quantity of questions per product was trimmed from 246 to 168
70%
reduced front-end dev. from two weeks to four days
My Take Away
How can a research strategy for such a dynamic eco system be undertaken, including identifying key stakeholders, selling and presenting solutions to product owners, data analysis, and design solutions for a product in multiple regions. Identify and map the relationships between various systems, then digest and present those data to users. This is one of the largest and most demanding projects he has ever worked on.