Sascar's Customer Portal

The Challenge

Sascar’s Customers Portal had an unpleasant interface and the marketing area believed that usability was also compromised. The project’s first objective was to discover all website’s problems with users and then create a redesign without changing the backend structure.

My Participation

At this project I worked on user tests, discovering problems and improvement opportunities, and coordinated the entire design proccess with marketing and IT area, designing wireframes and medium fidelity prototypes, testing and validating the prototypes with marketing, operations and call center areas, dialoguing with frontend and backend developers during the programming step, solving questions and thinking on alternative solutions when needed, and, finally, monitoring the new website’s launch to measure the acceptability.

The Project

This project began with a request of a Usability Test for the current Sascar’s Customers Portal. With the help of call center area, I related the most used features and then created tasks with them to users do at an improvised usability lab. Parallel to this proccess, I applied a Nielsen’s and Bastien-Scapin heuristics mashup to identify technical usability issues. With the data collected on both processes, I created an usability report, to be used as a validation of the project.

The next step was to redesign the information architecture, considering the main requirement: don’t change the backend structure. This was a challenge sometimes, because there were some fluxes that would work better if developed again. The dialog with backend developers was extremely important at this project due to create a new viable interface, avoiding possible reworks.

After the architecture’s approval by marketing, call center and IT areas, I started design a navigable wireframe in order to present it and test it with users. For each feature delivered, the approval proccess was made, so that every area involved in the project would have their needs attended.

As the Design Standards were previously defined, the focus of this project was exclusively on the user experience. After all content, hierarchy, architecture and wireframes were defined and approved, the Design Team’s job was only to monitor the frontend work in order to assure the project’s quality.

Results

This project was delivered in December, 2017, when the old Customers Portal was replaced by the new one. The first week after the deploy was significant, because the customers were used to the old version and had to adapt to the new one. At the first month after launch, it was already possible to measure the project’s success: there was a significant reduce of calls, and an increase of Customers Portal use.

This is another success case at the corporation, due to the costs reduce and satisfaction improvement provided exclusively by a new user experience.