DESIGN case

CRM task tracking
design refinement

Upservice.io is a Customer Relationship Management platform designed for the service industry, available on mobile and web, it delivers correspondence collated onto a single platform, task management features and a peer reviewed jobs board.

Overview

I was tasked with managing the redesign and refinement of the Upservice.io CRM system UX and interaction, for the web platform. This included upskilling the Upservice.io Design Team through mentoring and development workshops.
The problem was a high click count based on user feedback, and the request from business to improve user goal achievement metrics.

What I started with:

Functional requirements and user roles
Access to the latest mockups and builds for testing
Onboarding workshops with stakeholders

Role & Duration

My Role: Product Design Consultant

Team: Product Owner, UI/UX Designer, Business Analyst, Frontend developer

Duration: 2 weeks (over 1 month)

Project Challenges

Usability & UX Design. Upservice.io users were confused by the platform’s chaotic information system and controls hierarchy
Design Process. Interfaces were not user-centric as a result of a poor UX research foundation and the internal team’s limited UX design expertise. The consistency of the product’s interface was negatively impacted by a weak design methodology, compounded by the absence of a design system.
Designer Approach. The designer responsible for tasks required significant professional development on how to effectively apply a systematic approach to deliverables and asset management.

My Responsibilities in Each Phase

Discover

Interview stakeholders and team to establish project expectations and requirements
Research and define Learning System Documentation requirements
Conduct user research via in-depth interviews with consumer groups

Define

Establish Information Architecture, UI Structure and Hierarchy
Complete Design Wireframing

Develop

Define user research analytics deliverables
Provide solution proposals based on user research and expertise
Upskill the Design Team through Mentoring

Delivery & Validate

Assess the performance of solutions through A/B Testing
Finalize the design proposals with relevant stakeholders against the project vision

Highlights

User Research – In-Depth Online Interviews

The project's user research was conducted through a series of in-depth online interviews with specific user groups, which identified how said groups used the platform and their respective pain points.
Data gathered during this process was predominantly qualitative, but valuable for assessing the system's present functionality.

Define

To inform the requirements for new Information Architecture, UI Structure and Hierarchy, data gathered during the in-depth interview process was analyzed and synthesized into usable insights.
The most significant failures of the existing design were identified through analysis of user interactions with the existing interface and each user group's specific pain points.

Develop

Insights gathered during the analysis of user research were transformed into clear deliverables and KPIs, for which design solutions were developed. I used these solutions as the basis for effective team mentoring sessions, identifying areas where team skills needed to be upgraded and providing strategies on how this could be achieved.
Finally, I transformed the proposed solutions into wireframes.

Delivery & Finalization

The performance of each proposed solution was assessed with A/B testing. The design proposals were then considered by a focus group and iterated further with the collection of stakeholder feedback.
Once a final design was agreed, I led a workshop session with the UX Designer to advise on the creation of final mockups.

Challenges

Large project scope. The project presented a significant scope of work and dependencies which were hard to prioritize and required a deep system approach
Limited time availability. My consulting time on the project was limited to 40 hours per month
Conflicting platform scopes. Different feature scopes for web and mobile platforms made delivering a design consistent on all platforms the harder option

Solution

By gathering insights early through user research, I was able to recommend where limited team resources should be prioritized at the start of the project, empowering me to work on iterative improvements to the project with the team.

Through this I delivered:

A dramatically improved layout concept, that was scalable for usage in other parts of the system
UI elements composition and hierarchy
Effective and evidence-based interaction principles, which simplified users ability to switch tasks, improved task interactions and making it easier to quickly review task lists

Layout: Before

Problems and mismatches with user scenarios logics I highlighted making user research analysis and my expertise:

Users doing too many clicks trying to manage tasks, see all attachments, comments and other task attributes. It obstructs focusing on their regular job.
Separate modal panels for single logical item confuses users with task operations. It makes management of task attachments and comments unavailable for users on the same screen.
There is no way to switch between tasks from a detailed task view. It decreases productivity and interrupts the normal flow of the primary tasks management user scenarios

Layout: After

What was changed:

Reduced 35% clicks quantity to operate and manage tasks
Based on user needs discovered, added ability to switch tasks from the detailed task view using a minimized tasks list
A detailed task view screen includes a separate vertical panel for comments and additional task attributes.

These changes matches requirements synthesized from user research analytics and workshops with stakeholders.