'MyWorkspace'

Lead Product Designer

I was embedded in a project team with four other NTT Data designers (mix of UX and Visual designers). My contributions were as follows:

• Collaboratively defined the overall user experience
• Responsible for designing specific areas of the product (end-to-end, focusing more on UX questions)
• Guidance to designers from the client teams (remote in India, China and Canada)
• Supported programme level decisions: roadmap and prioritisation, refining the scope for the MVP, workflow improvements, identifying risks etc.

A multinational bank wanted to transform the way its frontline staff deal with customers’ queries (branch or contact centre staff). The goal was to replace a range of over 40 disparate legacy applications with a single, efficient and easy to use solution. We worked closely with end-users during all phases from discovery to delivery: creating concepts, refining our designs, until the delivery of MVP designs for the key markets.

Across the group, hundreds of different applications are used in branches and contact centres. Having so many systems is ineffective, costly to maintain, and entailed many risks for the business (operational, compliance, reputational). Some systems are dated and their support is coming to an end - another reason for the bank to solve this issue at pace.

We ran regular workshops with each market (UK, US and later HK: so two or three weekly sessions). Staff from branches and contact centres - our key users for MVP - always attended the sessions. We also interacted a lot with other SMEs like staff managers, or experts in the current systems.

In the initial rounds, we were mostly reviewing answers to a set of ‘surveys’ the PO had initiated.

Although these sessions helped to refine the requirements, they were lacking context: the focus was too much on features, rather than on users’ journeys or tasks. So, we took over and started probing about existing journeys and reviewing concept screens to get feedback and insight on the reason our users needed specific data, or on how they or their customers interacted with the systems.

I regularly took the lead, driving users through scenarios (for the key journeys we had identified), sharing concepts, and uncovering the reasons behind some of the initial requests. This was a way to supplement any contextual enquiries or walkthrough sessions we might have had without Covid.

At first, some stakeholders were a bit uncomfortable with having so many questions asked. They quickly realised how, through design, these would translate into more appropriate solutions: hierarchised information (rather than displaying everything upfront), a product tailored to user needs (rather than a “lift and shift” of previous systems), etc.

We put a lot of thought into the ‘MyWorkspace’ global layout. Based on our assumptions (content to be displayed, multitasking scenarios), we defined a multi-column environment:

• the core content/journeys using the central space, and supporting journeys or data would be on the sides.
• The navigation at the top included a product level header, a customer session header and a tabs bar area.

Research had confirmed our users worked either on desktop (laptop + external screen) or on tablet ‘landscape’ (with a decent screen resolution). So we designed these components to be responsive, at least to cater for these devices (but not for mobile).

I supported the work on many other aspects of the global product. One example was the definition of a 'tile' template.

I also helped with components such as tabs and tabs management, or with the navigation between different customer profiles (see figure below).

While my colleagues were defining the main navigation patterns and components, I focused on other areas of the product described in the following sections.

(1 PM, 2 BAs, 1 Visual designer, 1 remote designer, dev team)

I initially worked on a separate ‘Card servicing’ initiative for a few months. I designed journeys linked to debit card requests managed in HK contact centres (e.g. staff dealing with customers wanting to report a lost or stolen card, replacing a card, managing their card limits etc.).

I collaborated with and led the work of a Visual Designer from our NTT team. The development team had already started working on this initiative. So, our main goal was to urgently deliver our designs. We mostly used a library of well-defined components (the bank relies on a mature design system). So producing wireframes and final designs didn’t require many iterations, and our designs were approved in time by the ‘Digital Design’ governance team.

Guidance/mentoring

On this work stream, I oversaw the work of a remote designer focusing on smaller journeys. She was based in India and directly employed by the bank. She was a junior designer with very little experience and limited access to, and knowledge of, the appropriate tools. So I got her up to speed and guided her in her first design assignment as much as I could. Once I had defined all the main design patterns (such as global navigation, simple edit journey, more complex requests with step tracker, etc.), the PM assigned this piece of work to other internal teams.

I redesigned Customers’ accounts related journeys.

With the current solution, for a given journey, the users had to look for account information in several locations, launching queries to various systems along the way.
Using ‘MyWorkspace’, the idea was to enable the users to navigate to a ‘hub’ page for a given account - where they could deal with the account in one place (key information on the account, settings management, associated cards, transaction history, etc.).

As mentioned above, we ran many sessions on this topic to clarify the requirements and co-create a solution. We reworked the information architecture: creating sections and grouping relevant data together.

I sketched various options for these pages and presented the users with concepts or prototypes we would review and iterate on. For the MVP, most journeys weren’t in scope end-to-end. We had to work with a ‘link-and-launch’ approach. This was reflected in our user flows.

For all the different areas of the account management, I produced wireframes (directly using the bank’s Design toolkit, as only a few elements within a page/tab needed more UI refinement). We iterated on the solution with the users, PO and BAs to ensure all the requirements were met (for the UK market to start with).

I collaborated closely with our visual designer to get the final UI designs approved. Then, we handed them over to the BA and dev teams (Zeplin, Jira/Confluence), and checked the implementation was correct.

The user testing revealed some issues with the amount of data presented on a single page. I initially warned the client about this potential issue, but they had a strong inclination to follow a "minimum clicks" approach… Relying on this feedback from actual users, I proposed alternative designs. One approach consisted in helping the users jump to the right section more easily (explored this option in prototypes - see below), and the other approach - my original suggestion - was to separate transactions from the rest of the account overview.

Product / service design opportunities

During these sessions, I also spotted a few opportunities to bring our work toward a Service design approach. For instance, one of the bank’s objectives was to decrease their customers’ dependence on staff support and to drive them to use digital channels. In the current situation, bank staff spotting a customer depositing a cheque via an ATM would let them know about the mobile banking option for this. I suggested this guidance should be integrated into the ATM journey itself. The SMEs were very interested in this idea. Following up on that idea, the client requested our NTT team to work on a new generation of ATMs as they wanted to explore how these could be integrated in ‘MyWorkspace’.

The users needed to keep track of their work on a customer profile, they also needed to collaborate with colleagues asynchronously. ‘Memos’ were the retained solution to answer these needs. I ran sessions with the US and UK markets which used the existing tools in slightly different ways. I iterated on concepts and refined them into designs accommodating various markets.

In my concepts, I included advanced functionalities to enhance the user experience. Some of them were too complex to be implemented in an MVP, so I took a phased approach with my specifications (simplified “bronze” version + increments in terms of complexity “silver” and “gold” solutions). For this specific part of the product, I prototyped the memo panel behaviour (in Sketch) so the users could comment on several aspects: data density vs. scrolling, filtering patterns, pagination behaviour, etc.

Another key part of the product I contributed to was the “insights and markers”. The requirements for this functionality were quite fuzzy, mostly being a list of all markers available in legacy systems. So as a first step, I reviewed around 100 elements with the users and we categorised them in various buckets (see board below: customer markers, account markers, insight or action, channel usage, etc.)

Then and more importantly, we clarified the usage of each piece of information and prioritise all this content (triage with the users and SMEs). This way I could keep only useful and high-priority elements on the main customer profile page: ‘channels’ usage was displayed with other information on a customer overview panel, while a handful of key insights or actions (if any available) were displayed in a dedicated “tile” on the main content area.

Other markers, when applicable, were displayed in context (e.g. in the tiles for account markers, or in the customer bar for customer level ones).

Reusable foundation work

• We delivered all the core behaviour, navigation and principles covering the federal items and the ‘customer session' landing page. We also provided templates for generic ‘product’ or ‘details’ pages.
• We shared an approved UI toolkit with the various design teams on this project. This enabled them to produce more journeys while being aligned with the core experience.

Buy-in from senior sponsors

• Sharing our work early and often, and in engaging ways (videos, prototypes) allowed the PO to secure more funding for future phases and to extend the scope of work.

Buy-in and involvement from end-users

• Proper UCD process with users involved at all stages, research, co-creation, testing, iterations and so on. We were very happy with this, as this is not a given in all projects
• Users advocating for our team to get involved in more projects
• During our workshops, the users were amazed by some of our proposals. We heard very positive reactions such as:
  
  - “When can I get this?”
  
  - “This would change our life”

Designs + MyWorkspace ‘phase 1’ delivered

• We delivered the MVP designs and followed the implementation of a first version of the product for the UK market







• This included co-existence with the older systems - we collaborated closely with architects and technical teams
• Approved by the business stakeholders, and the bank ‘Digital design’ governance

Accessibility, and D&I considerations

• All our designs took accessibility issues into account. The bank aims to deliver AA-accessible products. We obviously followed these standards for a staff experience product as much as we did on consumer-facing ones in the past.
• During our workshops, we discussed ID fields related to the customer’s gender as well as their 'preferred greetings', I raised concerns about potential confusion around those fields and the various nomenclatures. Some improvements required at the backend level were then planned.