channel management

Let admins manage their loan offers independently

worked with:

  • product manager
  • UX researcher
  • engineers

produced:

  • journey maps
  • information architecture
  • wireframes
  • mockups
  • prototypes

context

The focus of this project was to let admins create and manage their company's loan offer groups (aka "channels") independently by introducing a new self-service feature in our platform.

Channels are groups of offers that get assigned to sales reps. This is how admins control which offers are available to their sales reps.

Because external admins weren't able to manage their channels independently, the Business Development team (BD) had to submit tickets to the Application Support team (App Support) on their behalf.

the opportunity

Reduce the volume of channel management related tickets submitted to App Support.

Improve visibility into how an organization's channels are configured, and increase efficiency in managing those channels.

the process

Discovery

This project was part of a larger initiative to build more self service features for external users. The product manager and I started by interviewing our internal BD and App Support teams to understand the existing processes and pain points of all of the features being considered.

To illustrate the inefficiencies of the existing processes, I created journey maps for the different features being considered for self service.

Because we planned to continue expanding self service functionality, I mapped out the information architecture for the admin section of the platform to consider how it might need to scale as we add new features.

Design

After establishing a better understanding of the future goals for the initiative, I created wireframes to explore options for updating the structure of the admin section to accommodate additional features.

Due to technical limitations, we didn't update the navigation as part of this project. But it was helpful to align Product and Engineering on the desired future state.

I also created wireframes to establish what new screens would be needed and explore different patterns for creating and editing channels. Because there are limitations to what offers can be grouped together, it was important to create an intuitive experience that made it obvious which offers could be added to a channel and which ones couldn't.

Once the product manager and I were aligned on the direction we wanted to take, I created high fidelity mock ups to flesh out the new screens and the interactions for creating and editing channels.  

With the high fidelity designs prepared, I partnered with our UX researcher to define tasks for usability testing and built an interactive prototype.

While usability testing proved that the interaction pattern for selecting offers for a channel were intuitive, the product manager and I discovered that the list of offers would be much longer than anticipated based on how the offer catalog is structured. This led me to further refine the UI to simplify and condense the list of offers.

By shifting the installation category to represent the channel instead of individual offers, I was able to reduce the length of the offers list by half. I also revised the way offers were displayed to further condense the list and make it more scannable.

Because the changes to the offers list were pretty significant, I worked with our UX researcher to conduct another round of usability testing.

In the second round of usability testing, we discovered that assigning channels to users wasn't as intuitive as we had hoped. While the scope for our initial release was limited, I still created some rough wireframes to document how we could create a more streamlined workflow that more closely connected users with channels in the future.

Since the initial release would be a "read only" version, I needed to create additional designs for engineering to reflect the different phases.

impact

After the initial read only release, App Support saw a 71% increase in tickets related to channel management. We're confident that this is a solid indicator that channel management will be broadly adopted once admins are able to do it themselves.

Initial training for channel management has received positive feedback. One member of the BD team even commented that "It's so easy to use, you won't even need training"