StructuredFN Design Sprint
Customertimes (CT) is a technology company that has helped over 200 clients in life sciences, finance, retail, and insurance improve their sales, marketing, and customer relationships.
CT engaged UXL to help envision the future of CT Mobile, a Salesforce-based tablet application that is used daily by retail sales representatives from diverse industries to service their flagship clients.
In a short but powerful field observation and collaborative design process, UXL helped clarify the product mission, devise solutions to pain points that maximize usability and efficiency, and prioritize design and development efforts.
UXL’s research-based plan and product design improvements establish the foundation for the next generation of this essential tool.
Process: Contextual Inquiry | Collaborative Design | User Experience Design | Visual Design
“We design based on facts, not on assumptions and perceptions. We design for real users, not for ourselves. Who are the sales reps? What is their daily work? What are their goals and challenges? We want to step into their shoes, walk a day with them, learn how they work, and then find the common patterns among them to inform and improve user experience for all of them.”
– Daniel Lafrenière, User Research
UXL began with a contextual inquiry to understand the typical day of a CT Mobile user. We joined and observed sales reps for different brands as they planned their day, traveled from store to store, met with customers, and used their tools. We focused on key questions such as: What are they trying to do? What are their needs and goals? What is difficult, complicated, or time-consuming? What do they not like to do?
We also interviewed stakeholders from other key accounts to understand the business needs fulfilled by CT Mobile as well as the issues they have encountered and improvements they wish to see. We then analyzed our research findings from both our contextual inquiry and stakeholder interviews to formulate an affinity map, user journeys, and persona to make the most of our intensive collaboration with the CT Mobile team.
“When clients are managing their products day-to-day, the focus is naturally on customer requests and what needs to be done now. Then the moment comes when they look at the product and say, I thought we were heading in this direction, but now we’re over there. How do we re-angle?”
–Julie Fortier, Managing Partner, UXL
Our analysis was followed by a two-day collaborative design workshop with 12 of CT Mobile’s product owners, engineers, and designers who are highly motivated to make the best product for their users. Day 1 of the workshop helped them think outside of their normal, everyday work to ask: What is our core mission? Where are we going? By organizing research findings into user insights, the team began to see informative patterns to steer their direction.
“This will define the best practices of our application for years to come.”
–Alexey Patsko, VP Products, Managing Director Europe, Customertimes
After the collaborative design workshop, UXL made three key design recommendations: 1) improve the core interaction paradigms to align with user needs and tasks; 2) make the UI more modern, friendly, and simple to use; and 3) develop much-needed features to support visit planning, the top-priority workflow. UXL realized these recommendations in a testable prototype to use as the basis for further design iterations toward the ultimate goal of making a more efficient, enjoyable tool that improves the lives of CT Mobile users.