Published: 8/16/2020

This post was originally written back in 2020. A lot of my thoughts and ideas have changed since then, but I've brought this back to see where I've come.

Overview:

When I first joined this company they told me I would be re-designing and developing an internal tools dashboard that their customer service representatives are using to diagnose issues users are facing. When I looked at their current platform I knew there was a lot of work to be done.

This company is a start up that hasn’t ever needed to put any emphasis on their internal tools, but as their customer base grows they know they need to make it much easier for Membership Representatives to diagnose problems.

Problem:

There is a lot of information within this tool as it holds just about every piece of information someone would need to know about a user from their data to their straps hardware. The overall goal was to just make this system better.

Amongst the UI modifications I needed to make, I tasked myself with these main challenges:

How can I make a membership representatives life easier in solving tickets customers put in?
How can I organize the information in a way where it is more readable?
Can I create a system so that the person after me doesn’t have to create a new dashboard?

Solution:

My main focus was organizing the information in such a way so that our Membership Service Reps. can easily find the information they needed. Overall I kept a similar structure to keep some familiarity between my version and the old version, but the first thing to go was the double top-nav bar. I created a hierarchy where on the left hand side all of the higher-level categories resided (users, teams, communities, clients) and the top nav bar controlled all the secondary information.

The next main focus was a card layout. This allowed for membership reps to easily know what type of information they are viewing. It really helped to break things down into ‘subjects’ allowing for a better organization of information. Cards also allow action buttons to be place in the corner making it easy to modify content within. The card layout is also very easy to design and develop for leaving the person after me to start working quickly.

To help the speed of ticket resolutions, we started to implement colors on the text to show things like out-of-date app version/firmware version, last upload time, and a negative customer balance.

Overall it isn’t the prettiest of designs, but it was by far the most effective allowing reps to quickly resolve customer problems.

Key Discoveries:

Knowing that our customers were employees that I work with, doing user experience research was far easier than having to talk to external people.

Once of the best things we did as a team was to implement a feedback button that sent messages right to our slack channel. Our team did a fantastic job of taking user feedback and reorganizing/redesigning things to the way our customers thought would be most effective.

The card layout was a huge success in this case because it allows a small team to worry less about designs for new features as they will generally be fit in cards. This also allows our customers to actively know when new feature have been build as we can point them to the card specifically. It greatly decreased our customers onboarding time and proved to be a less intimidating tool.