product design leadership
Saving Project Managers Time and Steps with a Task Management Launchpad
The Challenge
A major telco client approached our company with a challenge: Help them identify the cause behind the abundance of support tickets being opened for their order fulfillment platform — and potential solutions to reduce the need for support.
What We Found:
We found that addressing pain points for project managers would also address them for 85% of other user groups. This is because project managers touch every part of the very complex, multilayered fulfillment process. While the tools they use are powerful, they are also confusing to learn, expose too much back-end complexity to the user, and require too many clicks and swivels. As a result, project managers need to be detectives: hunting through many tools and platforms and mountains of data just to figure out their daily priorities — taking away from time spent on customers and ultimately delaying installation. This had an outsized effect on the bottom line.
An early wireframe
Our Approach
As Experience Director, I led a cross-disciplinary team over several engagements to identify the cause, propose, and then help design the solution: a task management launchpad. We also worked as an embedded part of the client’s product team, solutioning and grooming the new launchpad application through development and deployment, as well as working with user groups to build a backlog of post-launch enhancements.
Our Team: Experience Director (yours truly), Experience Designer, Research Strategist, and Solution Architect. We also worked directly with the client’s Product Owner and development team as an embedded part of their product team.
My contributions:
Contextualized business goals, objectives, and outcomes for the team. Ensured the team had the right information and resources to do their jobs and cleared up any ambiguity that proved an obstacle. Course-corrected during project pivots.
Creative direction & feedback. Reviewed design work for quality, best practices, and adherence to business and user goals.
Ensured team incorporated research and validation insights into design output and prioritized feature list and backlog.
Represented design in cross-functional product development team. Solutioned wireframes and prototypes of user-validated concepts and vetted with technical architects and developers, refining designs during grooming to deliver high-fidelity prototypes and design documentation for developer handoff.
Acted as a key point of contact for our client and executive sponsors. Executive-level presentations on user needs, design concepts, progress, & priority of design work.
Contributed to the client’s user education content and training materials.
Proposed enhancements and new feature for product backlog based on post-launch user feedback.
A tile for every priority task with deep links to take action
Stats & details make the experience richer, while progressive disclosure reduces cognitive overload and aids focus
The Solution
What We Built: A highly customizable task management launchpad that pulls (via several APIs) and curates key data in one place, with deep links where they can take action.
The Results: Introducing this new launchpad into the project managers’ process:
Reduces clicks by 35% to 50%, depending on the workflow
Reduces time spent on key tasks from 189 minutes/week to less than 6 minutes/week