Company:
USAA

Year:
2020

Duration:
4 months

My Role:
UX/UI Designer

The Work:
Observation Studies
Diary Studies
Hi-Fidelity Wireframes

Greetings! As the nature of this work is confidential, I won’t be able to show any project visuals for the time being. However, I can provide a description of the work I’ve done and how I solved the problem.

Project Summary

This project aimed to unify eighteen experiences into a single front door( so users can more efficiently engage with process administrators and access valuable resources. If a user wanted to put in a request for a particular security clearance, they would have to find the right site out of the eighteen security sights, search hundreds of forms, submit the form correctly or call one of the few process administrators for help.

In the first phase of this project, users had trouble finding and completing request forms on their own and often reach out to process administrators for help. The users outnumbered the administrators 10 to 1, so the additional support they had to provide interfered with the processor’s daily work task and often overburden them.

I was introduced into the second phase of the project, with two other UX designers. We wanted to understand the processor’s daily work tasks so we knew all the challenges they faced and which took the longest for them to complete.

I supported my team by conducting an observational study with 11 participants and a diary study with 10 participants. They worked quickly so to keep up; we created an excel sheet using Data Validation Lists to populate our notes swiftly. We noted each form they reviewed, software used, the exact time they started, communication method, type of consultation, who’s team was involved, software used, and how many minutes did it take for each user.

After we completed the studies, I helped organize the data and help create insights. We learned the following: Users waste time filling out the wrong forms, also wasting the time of the administrative processors who process the forms. According to the diary and observation study, participants spent an average of 33% of their time on consultations during observations, only 12% lower than their on-call counterparts.

How might we improve upon this experience? We decided to develop a design concept that would address our insights by creating a single front door experience for our end users. By this time, we started working from home due to the Pandemic. We quickly set up our home offices and decided to use online tools like Freehand to share ideas quickly.

We started a white-boarding in Freehand, timeboxing ourselves to rapidly draw low-fidelity wireframes to address all of the jobs to be done.

We created a conceptual IA design that I built in Sketch to keep track of all the pages we needed to make. I took ownership of increasing our wireframes into a hi-fidelity concept design with a selection of ideas that will carry forward into the next phase.

I used Sketch and InVision to create a happy-path prototype so our stakeholders could see how our designs would address or goals. We inform the users of their form submission, set completion time expectations, provide an easy way to check its status without calling support, and organize all their claims on one website.

Next Steps

Due to COVID-19, the project is temporarily on hold to prioritize compliance efforts and helping employees transition to work from home. We provided them with a list of open questions that need to be addressed before moving forward.