Although this contract was supposed to be for a UX Designer role, in reality, it was 95% UX Research.
The organisation (that I currently can’t disclose due to an NDA), was a very established international Tabacco group that was interested inmoving from an archaic way of storing data, analysing it and reporting it (heavily reliant on spreadsheets) into a one-size-fits-all solution.
All of this working and integrated with Salesforce. The challenges were immense as this would not only consolidate multiple platforms into one (with the technical limitations that this brings) but also dramatically change the organisation processes, habits and even culture.
This project was one of the most intricate UX research contracts I have ever worked on. We started by selecting, organising, and trimming the questions we were going to use for the stakeholder interviews. As the focus was mainly on the senior management and salespeople, I have used some of my previous expertise within B2B sales to further question their work processes on sales life-cycle from lead generation to the close and everything in between.
In total we have performed a total of 16 key stakeholder interviews (including the CEO), 4 group workshop interviews and over 36 hours of analysed footage.
Once the interviews were concluded the analysis phase started. Although it’s said that, on average, for each hour of research, 2hours of analysis are needed, in this case, due to time constraints, myself and the other strategic designer had to work around the clock (including weekends)to crunch the data.
As it was such an extensive research phase, identifying the information saturation was relatively straightforward.
As such and based on the number of times that issues were mentioned by different people, and what they have considered important to improve/change, we have started identifying themes, patterns and ultimately clusters.
Due to time constraints, towards the middle of the research, we had to strategize.
And so my colleague focused on the main themes whereas I have focused on identifying and converting the outcomes that could be taken into technical requirements. This analysis was also essential to understand the future information architecture and how it would correlate between the different sections of the platform.
These requirements would later on be converted into user stories by myself and the Business Analyst.
The outcome was a Power Point presentation including all of our research results, quotes, and even recommendations.
Here was where we have informed the organization that consolidating their various platforms into Salesforce, could potentially influence the company's culture and a possible change in the way of working.
As the use of the new Salesforce platform and integrations would demand such a dramatic working culture change, for the first time in my career, besides UX recommendations we have also suggested a few work process improvements.
These findings have caused a stir within the organisation and so, before presenting to the very senior management, we have had a few meetings with the directors to better word and structure the findings.
Besides the UX analysis, we have also suggested the organization to add to the SOW the Salesforce Transformation Services to help streamline the effectiveness of the users adopting the new CRM and processes.
As mentioned above, in this project the UI Design was minimal. However I have contributed for the redesign of a third party Salesforce plug-in aimed at improving the sales staff reporting tools.
This implementation was focused on improving their organisation process compliance for when sales people are on site visiting customers.
As everything in Salesforce works in a modular way, these wireframes were prototyped but presented in lo-fi.
This very fast paced project was interesting not only from an organisational point of view but also on a cultural and personal perspective as most of the senior management assumptions and expectations were challenged during this process.
When I left the project the technical architects were diving deeper within staff usability workshops to further zoom into the initial requirements that myself and my colleague have gathered.
I didn’t see the end of the project but I am confident we have set a solid foundation to identify and change what was really needed in that organization.