Summer 2019 Internship Project for a Large Financial Institution

Timeline: 10 Weeks

Team: 2 UX Designers | 1 Design Researcher

My role: UX Designer

Challenge:

My team was tasked with combining two complex, separate call center systems into one which works for multiple employee types and is intuitive for all users regardless of employee type or specialization.

Process:

As a team, we listened to calls for 1-2 hours before mind mapping what we knew to discover areas we needed to learn more about and to become aware of our biases.

Keeping in mind pain points we discovered while listening to calls, we individually created sketches of rough layouts prior to generative research sessions.

The researcher conducted generative research to understand current user problems and gain an understanding of an ideal solution to address potential user needs. They guided participants through a generative workshop in which they wrote a breakup letter to their old system, then utilized felt shapes to create their ideal system in groups of two. During this time, my fellow designer and I acted as note takers, paying close attention to what call center employees voiced. After completing all generative research sessions, the researcher coded the data into themes, then affinitized the themes to find salient insights.

My partner and I combined these research insights and parts of our individual sketches to create three main concepts to take to our business partners. Each concept we created focused on a high-level theme found within research. These themes were based upon topics such as: familiarity, information architecture, and visual representation of information overview.

After consulting with business partners, the professional design staff, and the researcher, we used Sketch to create a final concept utilizing the most successful parts from the 3 prior, hand drawn concepts. Then we had business partners and the professional design staff critique this combined concept, and made further refinements based upon this feedback. Before passing it on to the researcher for evaluative testing, we converted our concept into an interactive prototype with clickable features.

The researcher then started to create an evaluative research plan, working closely with us to create scenarios which could be used to test usability with call center employees. The researcher moderated these tests while we took notes in each session. After completing these sessions, the researcher compiled the resulting data and handed it off to my partner and I.

Upon receiving the evaluative research data, we made all the appropriate changes we could within the remainder of the internship timeline before assembling a final presentation with design recommendations.

Outcomes:

Upon completing our summer internship, we left the business partners with many assets: a working prototype which was tested to be generally intuitive, a breadth of research which could be expanded upon later, and a list of design recommendations which acted as next steps. Our business partners were very pleased with the outcome of our 10-week project and eager to show the results to higher management.