CLient
Project
Creative direction for building a competitive channel marketing application
Project length
4 years
RESPONSIBILITIES
Lead UX Design
UI design
Art Direction
Data analysis
- Other case studies:
- Preservica
- AgSpace
- Zift Solutions
The challenge
During the time I worked at Zift Solutions the company went through a few transformations. As one of the leaders in enterprise channel management they needed to get ahead of competitors and required a more modern approach on their UX solutions.
I was brought in as part of the core team to build and lead a UX team which I grew to 6 designers and front end developers. The product was beautifully engineered but as a legacy application it had no UX influence and therefore lacked an intuitive user experience. I introduced Bootstrap into the system to help make the application responsive.
I ran workshops to enable developers, sales and project managers to look for good UX principles. I set up a Friday matters workshop which allowed teams to show coming features and new technology suggestions. The application was made up of two parts; the content management system and partner portal. I managed the UX for both aspects of the application.
I redesigned the partner portal to have a modern look and feel and changed the way our product services implemented custom designs. This reduced implementation time by 4 days.
Partner Portal
One of my first tasks was to make the application responsive. I achieved this by bringing in Bootstrap into the application and worked through 140+ features and ensured they all displayed correctly on all devices.
I also redesigned and implemented the out of the box template which partners would get on sign up.
Project goal
Design a responsive application.
Craft a beautiful out of the box template for customers to use.
Design custom templates for partners. Canon and Kaspersky are amongst the partners
Design a mobile app to allow easier training plans.
Enforcing a cohesive application using a style guide.
Create new features to support sales and keep the application ahead of the competitors.
Onboarding
I designed a more intuitive onboarding system speeding up the process. One of the main problems account managers were facing is how long the onboarding took to implement. It was a manual process and I initiated this project which took the process down from two days per partner to 2 hours.
Design Exploration
One of the biggest challenges was to convince the business to invest in UX research. Their current process didn't involve UX and would develop directly from requirements without fully designed wireframes.
In the first few months I set up workshops, conducted customers and sales interviews to understand the frustrations in the product. I documented personas, user journeys and helped create an extensive roadmap alongside our chief product owner.
Style guide using XD
Atomic consistency
One of the first things I did was create a style guide with reusable components to keep the wireframes consistent. This was an important tool to enable faster wireframe mockups and for the development team to use and build an atomic application. I created a SASS stylesheet of design tokens, for the developers to use, along with a style guide. I assisted the developers in building this out into an Angular project.
Customers using Zift
Partner scorecards
I needed to enable collaboration across our partner ecosystem, automate resource-draining tasks, deliver dynamic visibility and eliminate complexities. This dashboard gave partner more visibility around sales and lead generations.
Research methods
Customer interviews
Market research analysis
Prototype testing
Customer journey
Persona gathering
Surveys and questionnaires
Requirements gathering
Low-fidelity and high-fidelity Wireframing
Custom partner portals
One of my tasks was to also design custom templates for our clients. I held workshops with the customers to help them understand what can be achieved with the limitations we had around core features.
I would design the best solution which matched their style guide as close as the application would allow. One of the customers was Canon who have a strict style guide process.
Defining the MVP
One of the challenges Zift Solutions faced before was having features developed without full investigations and discovery. This created an enormous amount of technical and UX debt. One of the approaches I would always take is a feature can be broken into two cases; MPV and full feature. I would help sales and our Chief product owner visualise what was needed and conduct user interviews to see if these features would be used. This allowed the business to make more accurate estimations and would give sales a roadmap to sell with a more accurate timeline.
Business plans
The following wireframes were designed to showcase the user journey for Zift Solutions business plans.
The Suppliers Business Planning for Zift Solution's partner relationship management (PRM) platform enables an organisation to automate the development of business plans, streamlining interactions between internal and external channel partner stakeholders to ensure efficient plan execution and compliance.
Colour palette
Primary colours
Secondary colours
Personas
I identified that there was no documented evidence of user research. Over the first few months I worked closely with the chief product owner to help define the various user personas. As the system is used by various countries and currencies it was imperative to understand each users needs.
Other case studies
Other case studies
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LEAD UX DESIGNER CONSULTANT
Reshape the landscape of digital preservation
September 2019 - current
A more advanced system which allows archivists a simpler, faster way to preserve their content.
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02
LEAD UX DESIGNER AND ART DIRECTION
Leading the digital transformation of farming
2018 - 2019
Led the UX of all AgSpace’s user interfaces. Managed UX direction across teams in a Scrum of Scrums Agile process. I designed the new administration tool which manages content, user access and satellite image editing across 3 platforms.
Take the journey with meToolset used:
