PROJECT TEAM
1 iOS scrum team (6 engineers in total)
2 product managers
PROJECT TEAM
1 iOS scrum team (6 engineers in total)
2 product managers
PROJECT TEAM
1 iOS scrum team (6 engineers in total)
2 product managers
PROJECT TEAM
1 iOS scrum team (6 engineers in total)
2 product managers
2014.7 - 2017.8
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VERITAS
Customer Experience Website
An internal portal that
evangelize customer experience
Minimum Viable Product
Data Protection
Lean UX
Best Pitch Award
Project Brief
Customer Experience (CX) organization at Veritas is mainly responsible for providing ultimate user experience for customers who use its products.
This summer, I interned at Veritas Technologies as a UX Designer Intern. we worked in a group of 4 (innovation pod) to create a platform that helps all Veritas employees know more about the CX organization and how crucial CX is for business success.
As the only UX person on the team, my main responsibility was to educate and lead my team members in conducting user research activities, usability testing sessions, as well as coming up with series of design iterations based on feedback we collected along the way from users.
Process
1. Understand
Project Brief
Customer Experience (CX) organization at Veritas is mainly responsible for providing ultimate user experience for customers who use its products.
This summer, I interned at Veritas Technologies as a UX Designer Intern. we worked in a group of 4 (innovation pod) to create a platform that helps all Veritas employees know more about the CX organization and how crucial CX is for business success.
As the only UX person on the team, my main responsibility was to educate and lead my team members in conducting user research activities, usability testing sessions, as well as coming up with series of design iterations based on feedback we collected along the way from users.
Role
UX Researcher and Designer
Project Length
12 Weeks
Methods
Lean UX, MVP, Guerrilla Testing
Design Process
Design Challenge
Customer experience is a key differentiator in the market. Researchers and designers at Veritas have worked on a variety of projects but each project has its own way of organizing the resources, which makes cross-team communication a big challenge. Existing collaboration tools and platforms including Confluence, OneDrive, Slack have been utilized judiciously by teams, but they failed to fulfill the need of an efficient search to find out valuable UX documents and the contact person of each project.
Current challenges associated with CX team include: ineffective cross-team communication, inefficient resource search, lack of understanding of User Experience
Real Problems: How might we help Veritas build a tool that facilitates and organizes UX resources?
Solution Overview
Project Details
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View and contact people working on the project
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View the top personas related to the project
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Find all the design, research and information development documents
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Find out important milestones of the project
News
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Keep people updated on news including design updates, research, CX events.
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Read detailed news posts.
Why do we need an internal portal for customer experience?
1.
Customer experience is critical for enterprise software
89% of marketing leaders expect to compete primarily on the basis of customer experience compared to 36% four years ago. (Gartner)
2.
User experience is a key differentiator
Marketing capture of Rubrik, one of the competitors of Veritas, is $300M in bookings run rate. The two key differentiators behind it are user experience and brand marketing.
3. User Experience is everyone's responsibility
Peter Merholz, VP of Global Design at Groupon
We recognize that UX is everyone's responsibility, not just designers.
Leisa Reichelt, Lead of Research and Insights team at Atlassian
No one person, no small group of people can be made responsible for the user experience of a service.
Joe Natoli, Author of Think First
It’s core mantra is this: great UX is everybody’s business — and it starts with what’s between our ears.
Research
Research Overview
When we were given the problem to solve, none of us knew where to start as this was a very broad topic. To understand our users and the design space better within a short timeframe, we did condensed discovery research (interviews, full transcribed interview analysis, as well as mini affinity wall workshops) in the first 2 weeks.
We conducted interviews with different functional roles across Veritas. Our interview protocol was designed to understand their roles, daily work, the pain points they have in day-to-day work, as well as their expectations for the portal.
Understand Users - Interviews
Synthesize - Personas
Product Manager
UX Designer
Sales Representative
Synthesize - Affinity Wall
Through the affinity wall workshop, we narrowed down the scope and defined the building blocks of our project.
Cross-Team Communication
Participants want to know what the other product teams work on and who are the primary contacts for each product, but they have to rely on their connections in the company to find it out.
Knowledge about CX
Not all of the employees know what the CX organization is working on, and valuable research and design work are only shared within a project team share folder.
Too many tools make it hard
There are too many internal communication tools for employees. It's difficult and time consuming to find design resources they are looking for.
Not well informed of Updates
Development teams who use VDL(Veritas Design Language) are not well informed of the latest component updates.
Key Features
2. Ideate
Rapid Design Lab
To generate new ideas quickly, we organized a rapid design workshop to brainstorm design ideas for the key features.
What is Rapid Design Lab?
This is a 1.5 hour design thinking workshop with a series of activities that aim at helping cross functional teams come together to solve a target user’s problem and come up with ideas.
Problem
A UX Designer who needs to share and manage design resources efficiently and proactively because current resources are located in various places and people are not motivated to share their work due to time limitation and potential criticism.
Problem Description
How Might We?
Crazy 8s!
Consolidate designs
Vote for best ideas
Discussion & Present
Process
Ideas
Interaction (Idea) Map
We consolidated the ideas collected from the RDL and with a sketchy interaction map.
We put the relevant design ideas under each interaction and use that as a basis for our wireframe.
3. Decide
Wireframe
To further actualize our ideas, we start to do low-fidelity mockups. Taking the fail fast approach, we conducted guerrilla testing and collected feedback. From this stage, we were able to consolidate the core part of the website: project repository and project details.
Tool
Balsamiq
Task
Users were asked to find the researcher working on CloudPoint and the key users of CloudPoint.
Round 1
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Number of participants: 7
2 user researchers, 3 UX designers, 2 PM interns
Avg. rating of the likelihood of using CX website: 7.6
In general, participants think that the structure of the website is clear and design is simple and minimalist.
Feedback
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Readability issue: vertical text is hard for users to read
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The function of the toggle button is not clear enough for users to understand
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Provides a more drill-down function for the contact person of a project, for example, name of the contact person could be clickable and it opens a new email window.
Round 2
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Number of participants: 5
2 Managers, 3 PMs
Avg. rating of the likelihood of using CX website: 8
All of the participants expressed their expectation towards our website, and there is a measurable increase (0.4) regarding the likelihoods of using the website.
Feedback
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On the Project Repository page, a clear information architecture needs to be established. And, a break-down of the structure is easy for users to find the content quickly
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An easy and accessible search bar is deemed as the first feature users look for when they want to find information through the website
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Learnability of the icons could be improved for switching between views can be improved (idea: add tooltip)
4. Prototype and Validate
Fully Fledged Interaction Map
Through 2 rounds of lo-fidelity wireframe validation and 7 rounds of prototype validation, we gradually finalized our interaction map for the website.
Iteration Overview
In the 7 rounds of usability testing, we were able to draw a lot of insights and improved our website from each one.
1
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Abandon Traditional Homepage
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Bolder design choice
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Image maintenance
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2
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Inconsistent File Folder Navigation
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Interchangeable use of banner and button is confusing
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Accessibility consideration
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3
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File folder navigation does not work well
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News: Information Hierarchy for is confusing
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More Color for different news type
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Sorting for projects
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Functional suggestion: VDL needs to be added
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4
Project Details page: Information categorization is confusing
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5
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Navigation on top right is not effective for non-tech users to complete the testing tasks.
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The CX brand identity is not straight forward.
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Think more abou the sorting option on Documents
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VDL button is too outstanding
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6
Alignment on brand assets through color theme A/B testing
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7
Primary project details section could be smaller.
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Reflection
As a team
The Best Pitch Award on CPO Competition!
We are a dynamic group with great work ethic. Every team member contributes to the team success from their own expertise. Even though there were conflicts and pressure in such a limited period of product development team we were able to support each other and headed towards a common goal. I was so fortunate to work with such a great group.
As a team player
Being adaptive is critical to the success. It's easy to get into the trap of "oh, we have to do interview coding so that we can draw out enough insights". I learned from this experience that the design principles and methods learned from schools are useful, but a better designer is able to be flexible in applying it case by case, collecting quick feedback, and improving the design!
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Wendy Du
Engineer
Yikai Zou
Designer
Deepak Kumar
PM
Dhruv Dhiman
Engineer
