EXPERIENCE VISION (LERETA)
February 2019
LERETA, a real estate tax service provider, looked to modernize its operations and scale the business. A new team was formed to conceive of a new process and build tools on a new platform.
This case study covers the start of that endeavor.
(Note: Operational details excluded for confidentiality)
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Challenge
How do we define the ideal experience for users of a conceptual product thats yet to be built?
Duration: 3 months
Users: internal processors (employees) -
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My Role
Research assistance, journey mapping, user flows & stories, wireframing, prototyping, onboarding future designers.
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Outcome
We established a vision on how future users’ experience would be. It informed our design decisions. It allowed for educated ideations before detailed information were gathered.
Process
Understanding the landscape
To understand the current process, I participated in system teardowns and took part in user interviews conducted by our Product Managers. It became evident that critical activities revolved around reconciling data between multiple systems and data sources.
Understanding the user
Through our qualitative research sessions we observed user-initiated workarounds to compensate for technical limitations.
In addition, a journey mapping exercise highlighted the motivating factors that influenced users’ behavior.
Journey Map - A sample of my notes as we observed a user for a day.
Conceptual users and their activities - I tried to envision who our future users might be and tasks they’ll be doing.
Research takeaways
There seems to be opportunities for improvement by minimizing multiple user ‘tool time’ typical to multi-resource systems. Also, the current operations grew organically creating pockets of knowledge and siloed groups. Improving the user experiences in these areas will pay dividends to the business by processing work faster and more efficiently.
Learning the constraints
Technical discussions gave insights to our the future platform. With a little bit of backend understanding, I mocked a workflow to check my assumptions. Workflow feedback provided a good starting point for mockups.
Thinking interaction
With some idea of what data looks like and the tasks users are doing, I played around with different interaction concepts. Understandable workflow and intuitive interaction became my concern. We ran usability tests on eventual wireframes and prototypes to alleviate that.
Conceptual workflow - Visualizing a workflow based on discussions with backend engineers and product managers.
Interaction concepts - Brainstorming interaction ideas based on possible user activities.
Testing our concepts
We were fortunate enough to be able to squeeze a usability test session. I went over the ‘happy path’ with our researcher and help facilitate the testing. Researcher’s report and our observations informed the designs further.
Prototype - Thumbnail view of the prototype used to validate design concepts through usability tests.
Affinity diagram session - Designers organizing their thoughts after observing a usability test.
Imagining an ideal user experience
At this point, we felt we knew enough to imagine a future experience for your new system. We let this vision guide our design decisions even before all product requirements came in. This allowed our Senior Visual Designer develop a style guide and Design System before final mockups. In turn, it informed our front end developers strategy. Our Experience Vision include:
Centralized knowledge base and resources
Auto tracking and reporting
Robust alert and notification system
Intuitive and modern user interactions
Incremental and predictive search mechanism
We were able to predict with some degree of certainty what type of interactions where needed before all product requirements came in.
Even with remaining unknowns, it can be assured product teams strategies were aimed towards the same vision.
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Lessons
The design team instinctively gravitated towards forming the vision. However, the benefits of a shared Experience Vision could have been amplified if the exercise was made more of a formal process. In the next opportunity, it wouldn’t hurt to increase our communication radius and stakeholders especially those outside the product group. By doing so, long term goals and expectations will be set.