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When external admins wanted to make an update to their organization’s configuration, they had to rely on our internal teams. I designed a new self-service feature enabling admins to manage their channels independently, resulting in a 46% reduction in Application Support tickets.
Channels are groups of loan offers assigned to sales reps, allowing admins to control what offers their reps are able to sell.
After reviewing existing pain points with the affected internal teams, I built and usability tested a functional prototype. Based on feedback, I refined the designs and identified areas for future improvements beyond the scope of this project.
While I led the designs for the initiative and built the prototypes for usability testing, I partnered closely with the Product Manager and other designers to ideate and iterate on the solution. I also worked with the UX Researcher to define usability testing goals and craft participant tasks, ensuring the solution would meet user needs.
The Product Manager and I interviewed members of the Business Development (BD) and Application Support (App Support) teams to understand their pain points with the existing process. I used this context to create a journey map to illustrate the inefficiency of the existing process and how it could be streamlined by giving admins direct access to manage their channels themselves.
Since I knew there would be more admin features developed in the future, I worked with the Product Manager to align on the long term vision. With the future goals in mind, I outlined a plan for the information architecture of the admin section.
Mapping out the IA made it clear that the existing navigation structure wouldn’t scale long term, so I created wireframes to explore options to accommodate additional features.
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While the PM and I agreed that side navigation would be the best pattern long term, making this update was deemed out of scope because of technical limitations. Even though we weren’t able to make these updates as part of this project, it was still helpful to align Product and Engineering on the desired future state.
I created wireframes to establish the new screens that would be needed and explore potential patterns for creating and editing channels.
I worked with the PM to get data on the range and average number of channels for existing organizations. This made it clear that the UI needed to accommodate a wide range of channels, as well as a long list of loan offers. Additionally, since there are restrictions around what loan offers can be grouped in the same channel, I needed to design an interaction pattern to make these restrictions obvious.
I partnered with the UX Researcher to define our first round of usability testing and craft the participant tasks. The main objective was to ensure that admins could find where to make channel updates and that the interaction pattern for selecting loan offers was intuitive.
With the tasks defined, I built a functional prototype for usability testing.
Through this round of usability testing I learned that admins expect to see a status for each of their loan offers. This prompted me to propose updates to the loan offers table as well.
While the usability testing confirmed that the interaction pattern was intuitive, the Product Manager and I realized that the list of offers would be much longer than anticipated because of how the offer catalog is structured.
This prompted further refinement to the way we displayed the list of offers. Using dropdowns to select offer details and changing how installation categories are selected significantly reduced the length of the list of offers, making it easier to scan.
Because the updates were pretty significant, we conducted another round of usability testing. The main focus of this round of testing was to ensure that the new display for viewing and selecting loan offers was intuitive.
While the updated offer display tested well, this round of testing revealed that assigning channels to users wasn’t as intuitive as we had hoped. This finding was a surprise since the ability to assign channels to users already existed. But it was a valuable reminder that just because a feature exists doesn’t mean it’s intuitive. Because the scope of this project was already tight, I drafted wireframes to capture future improvements.
Since the development was going to be done in phases, I worked with the PM to ensure the designs accounted for what functionality would be available (or not available) in each phase.
The initial release was a read-only version to improve visibility into how an organization’s channels are configured. Ironically, this resulted in an increase in tickets submitted to App Support. Even though this was contrary to the business goal for this project, we saw it as confirmation that there would be strong adoption once the later phases were released.
Once the ability to make updates was released, we saw a 46% decrease in App Support tickets. This was particularly significant since the release was only made available to 42% of active organizations.