Redesigning the way employees interact and analyse customer data
Client Contribution
iO Energy Team Lead
Jun - Jul 2022 (6 Weeks) UX Designer
UI Designer
Team
Tal Adler-Levi, Emily Carvalho, Amanda Denning,
Hannah Dimmock, Kelly Thornton
WHY REDESIGN?
iO Energy's customer database is growing and users were finding it increasingly difficult to sort through customer data and identify problems. A dashboard was created to help ingest the data into a more manageable platform however the user interface was clunky to use and required previous knowledge to navigate.
iO Energy approached us to redesign their dashboard.
RESEARCH
Usually, research is conducted with many people to gain several points of view, but we hit a project restraint from the beginning: There were currently only 2 users of the dashboard.
We conducted one on one interviews and contextual inquiries with both users to hear their thoughts on the dashboard. Both users had different roles within the company.
PERSONAS
From our research, we were able to gather that the goal of the dashboard was to be used by three different management levels - agent, manager, and executive.
Due to the time constraints of the project, we focused on creating the dashboard for the agent level. We created the main persona and customer journey map for our agent level and lean personas for our manager and executive levels.
Meet Paul Spark.
GOALS
We created a list of questions to focus our ideation on our persona's biggest pain points:
1. How might we improve the dashboard to provide users with information tailored to their roles and encourage further exploration?
2. How might we ensure the dashboard provides a greater level of visibility into a customer's past, present and potential future situations, to better understand them and to make issue detection easier?
3. How might we enhance the dashboard functionality, so that users can prioritise and resolve tasks, and manage deadlines more effectively?
4. How might we improve the transparency and prioritisation of customer tickets across staff members?
STYLE GUIDE AND ICONOGRAPHY
iO Energy had an existing colour palette for their customer website, and to keep the internal dashboard aligned with their colour palette, we utilised the same deep purple and vibrant pink as our primary colours.
Adding to this, I designed 6 icons for each of their residential and business plans, which aligned with the playful imagery on their website.
ITERATIONS
The dashboard went through three iterations following two successful user testing sessions which allowed fine-tuning of each page.
While each of us collaborated on the designs of each page, I was directly involved in the design of the customer account pages.
Originally, there was only one page for each customer plan, however, it was common for customers to have more than one plan linked to their account.
In our second and final design, a customer overview and a customer account page were created.
DESIGN
The goal of our dashboard was to simplify the existing user flow of the current dashboard, along with making it more visual. We kept the pages of the dashboard the same as the research suggested this worked for users, however, we rehauled the design of the dashboard to remove clutter and added more colours and icons to indicate issues and urgencies.
The ticketing system was also completely revamped to allow users to see a complete history of a ticket as well as allowing users to create a ticket in-house, which was previously done on another program
Below are the final designs.
LEARNINGS
Collaborate remotely
Learning to effectively communicate with each other was essential for our team to function, especially since we were working remotely and some team members were in other time zones. We learned to understand each other's goals and strengths and worked with these in mind to gather the best outcome for our client.
Being flexible and prioritisation of tasks
As the team lead for this project and due to the limited timeframe of this project, I had to learn to make quick decisions and prioritise tasks to keep the flow of the project going. We had a couple of mishaps at the beginning of the project which threw us off course in our timeline but we worked around these and quickly regrouped to stay on track.
Success measurement metrics
Learning to use metrics to measure success is something I would do differently next time. Our team held user testing sessions to gather insights into the usability of our designs but did not have a basic measurement strategy. Having a measurement strategy along with keeping the client's and user's needs in mind will allow us to measure and compare the usability of our designs over time.