Role

UX Researcher UX/UI Designer

Project Summary

UX research and design led implementation of additional features on an existing Salesforce Service Cloud system for a NSW government agency’s customer service centre where I worked as the sole UX/UI designer in a cross-functional Agile delivery team.

How might we enable staff to provide information and support to NSW public more efficiently with the information they need?

Challenge

The client had already implemented the bare bones features customer service agents needed on Salesforce Service Cloud to perform their day to day work. However, agents often found the system frustrating to use when handling customer calls or looking for information about customers during follow-ups.

The ask was to optimise the usability of the existing system and also understand user needs for 2 additional service functions to be built.

Approach

UX Discovery Phase

The Lead UX Designer and I kicked off discovery immersing in business background documentation and researching government services customer experience best practice.

We conducted qualitative and quantitive UX research with 8 customer service agents across various roles in the centre, including:

Contextual inquiries to understand the call centre agents and feedback handlers’ workflow, behaviour and how they interacted with the existing interface.
Usability shadowing sessions where we observed and quantified users interacting with the system against metrics such as the amount of toggling, number of screens and clicks, total time and steps to complete tasks. These metrics formed a benchmark to compare the future enhanced system agains
Focused interviews which gave users an opportunity to express their feelings about the current system and expectations for the enhancement. The interviews uncovered user frustrations, pain points, desires and helped us understand the reasons behind the behaviours observed during contextual inquiries and shadowing sessions

Leveraging my functional knowledge of Salesforce, we created a bespoke Salesforce heuristic evaluation tool to assess the usability of existing Service Cloud CRM system. The evaluation results highlighted opportunities to improve the task orientation with simply information architecture fixes. The results further supported the insights uncovered from from contextual inquiries, usability shadowing and focused interviews.

Our comprehensive research and deep understanding of user behaviour enabled us to construct detailed current-state user workflows. The insights synthesised from findings were flipped into 6 key opportunities to guide the design of the system enhancement and additional feature implementation.

UX Design Phase

Against the opportunities uncovered, we ideated on solutions to solve for the user pain points and designed features to enable efficiency when finding information, inputting data and conducting guided calls.

We created mid-fidelity UX prototypes and conducted usability testing with the 8 customer service agents. Usability test results demonstrated significant improvements in efficiency and user satisfaction.

We iterated the prototypes and created future state user workflows with the optimised interface which were used for change management and onboarding of the development team. The future state user workflows demonstrated how the optimised design would mean reduced manual input and both fewer steps and screens for task completion.

We also consulted with the Solution Architect and Lead Developer to ensure feasibility of the proposed designs and ensured that user stories were updated to reflect design features.

I created a document detailing the UX recommendations against mid fidelity screens to inform Development phase and align the project team on UX Phase output.

UX/UI Design and Development

The Lead UX Designer rolled off and I continued as the sole UX/UI Designer collaborating closely in a cross-functional team of developers, business analysts and solution architect.

During the build, I created 100+ mid fidelity UI screens/prototypes iteratively for user stories one sprint ahead of the development schedule. This ensured that the team had enough time to discuss options and iterate according to feedback.

At each design sprint, I presented the prototypes to the client product owners with UX research insights annotated against the screens. Collectively, the solution architect, business analyst and I presented the design options available to the product owners so that they could make an informed decision on what to build and prioritise. At the beginning of each development sprint, I supported the developers by contextualising user stories and iterating UI screens any technical constraints were raised.

Outcome

The project team received positive feedback from the client product owners, executive sponsors and project manager for our evidence-based UX recommendations that really addressed user needs and led to enhanced usability of the system. The enhanced system was well adopted by users and the customer service team is now better aligned with the business process for customer service calls.