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Umbrella Digital Marketing decided to leave Quickbase and design a custom workflow for its account managers by creating their own Order Management System. While dev simplified the experience by bringing the core workflows of Quickbase into their native app, I stepped in to oversee the UX of the new native app and conduct usability tests with our users.
UX Research, UX Design
The account managers Umbrella Digital Marketing use QuickBase to manage their marketing campaigns & internal tasks. The problem with Quickbase is that the user experience doesn't fit the employees workflow, and it's expensive. The engineering team at Umbrella decided to create a better user experience by building an internal tool with Retool.
The engineers used their knowledge of the employees current workflow to create a prototype Order Management System. The new internal tool kept the core functionality of Quickbase while simplifying many important user flows. Once the prototype was ready to test, I stepped in to gather feedback from the staff who would be using it daily.
I prepared a introductory script which covered the following:
I collaborated with the dev team to create testing documents in Confluence for three user flows: creating a customer, creating a task, and creating a campaign within the platform. Each of these documents included:
I used these documents to refer to the user journey, record user feedback, and measure the overall outcome of each test session.
I conducted 20 moderated test sessions - two sessions for each internal user. I began each session by establishing rapport with the user and proceeded to stick to my introductory script. Before we started the activity, I transitioned into an informational interview with the user to further discuss their current workflows & concerns about the new platform. Some of my questions included:
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I then guided users through each flow within the new platform and referred to the testing plan docs. When I would notice users beginning to struggle, I was careful not to answer every question the user had in the moment so I could gauge the usability of the application without helping them too much. When necessary, I would provide a response to the user's question that would encourage them to proceed with the activity without handing the answer directly to them.
After I took detailed notes of each session, I converted high-priority user needs and bugs identified within the session into front-end tickets through our team's Jira workflow. I monitored each issue and communicated with the team to confirm that everything was resolved before launch.
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I maintained a balance of communication by translating user needs to the dev team to ensure that we were satisfying all aspects of the user experience.
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When there was a piece of user feedback that indicated a redesign, I went back to diagramming user flows that could solve for the usability issue. Once I prepared notes and potential solutions for this particular flow, I started a team dialogue by creating a ticket to initiate planning. From here, the team and I would collaborate in daily group sessions where we would ideate until a solution is reached.
During testing, users reported that they wanted a custom dashboard view within the new platform that housed high-level sales analytics and links to all of the other platforms and tools that Ad Operators use on a daily basis. I wireframed a new dashboard view and worked with both the dev team and stakeholders to bring the vision into a reality.
The dashboard view included the following features requested by users during usability testing:
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When it came to launch day, the dev team and I got on a group call to monitor the success of the push to production. We delegated different areas of the application to the group, and tested everything live.
I helped monitor any incoming help desk tickets and used my knowledge of the new platform to solve any issues the users were having. Some of these tickets turned into feature requests that I also helped facilitate.
