Be the Bringer of Joy

I strongly believe that every worker should feel a sense of purpose in the job that they do. In a time where automation is the trend, I strive to create a good user experience by removing the tedium from the users daily operations so that they can focus on what makes them enjoy their job.

Contribution:
• Vision & strategy deck
• Execution of regular deliverables
• Presentation to stake holders
• Road mapping
• Revenue of $3million
Lessons:
• A cross functional team can be greater than the sum of its parts
• The value of communicating with pictures
• Separate what users say from what the problems are

Objective Summary

Have you ever been responsible for the happiness of workers you never met?

If I could could create a solution so amazing I designed my self out of a job, I’d call that a win. I believe in the creative nature of people. No matter the role, we all gain a sense of satisfaction from solving a problem. I wanted to create a workflow that enabled the sense of team work and problem solving.

Observation

No one on this project is happy. The users are unhappy with the tool they have to use, the customers are unhappy with the product outcome, the development team is unhappy having to work on something they are not proud of, and GM is unhappy having to pay agencies to create assets.

In short, I saw an appetite for change from all parties involved.

Approach

This happens to be my favorite part of the job, investigative work! First I tracked down all the key players that are involved in this project and started a series of 1x1 interviews with each of them. I’ve kept some very high-level notes about their problems and desires, which eventually revealed a solution in my mind.

In order to effectively pitch this solution, I started to separate the work required into Vision, Strategy, Tactics, and Execution. This exercise helped provide context when talking to different roles so that they could visualize how this fit into their responsibilities.

Task Based User Problems

Have you ever heard of geotagging? The workflow of the tool worked like geotagging. Assets and content were created by different contributors uploaded to different areas of the tool, compiled and pushed to production by developers. This communication was managed through phone, text, email, or TFS. This decentralized model accompanied with an absent IA made it tedious to perform even the simplest tasks.

Solution

As features were continually added to the product, the original structure didn’t scale for all of these new additions. It was apparent that we needed to prioritize a redesign of the information architecture. My solution here was to create a dashboard that integrated with TFS and doubled up as a communications hub. Tasks will be created, assigned, and executed all within the tool.

The completely new work flow opened up opportunities for improvement to the entire project, freeing up time that can be allocated to more meaningful tasks.

Dealer User Problems

This tool was used by Dealership owners to manage their digital profile on the online sales space. The dealership facing tool was experiencing the same problems of scalability of the IA and there was an over reliance on making support calls for interface issues that could be resolved with better organization. This tool was also how Dealerships would manage the content and inventory on their websites. However, when we watched how users were using the tool, they required a variety of external tools and tracked their performance metrics in a shared Excel file.

Examples of Original UI

Solution

I started by listing out all entities in the tool and categorized them into groups based on business logic and organized them on pages in a clear and digestible fashion. The new layout allowed the users to intuitively find their own dealership within the system, manage everything about their physical and digital profile, as well as their own franchise website all in 1 spot.

The newly organized information also allowed for a contextual display of performance metrics, negating the need for an outside excel file.

GM Problems

GM has long been unhappy with the involvement of Agencies in this project. When a task was too difficult to perform in the GM provided tool, they would outsource that work to the Agency of record, and GM was forced to eat a portion of that cost. GM’s goal was to streamline the workflow to minimize the hours Agencies spent on asset production.

Solution

“The problem isn’t the time spent creating the assets, but the need to create those assets in the first place”

The interviews have revealed that many of the requirement forms (business requests) filled out by Clients and Business teams have been tracked and managed in a variety of formats. To optimize the workflow, the solution was to simply aggregate the requirement forms into 1 system, which made it possible to automate its tracking and management.

Impact

This went from being a portfolio project paid by GM, to a Dealership council funded project that saw a revenue of $3million. Needless to say, the significance of making revenue in an in sourcing organization was quite the moral booster.