What if every employee has a different process working with the same system to place an order?
The problem
Zones is one of the largest technology distributors in the world-growing at such a rapid rate that sales systems needed to be updated to optimize efficiencies.
Ad-hoc solutions create chaotic workflows. Staff was frustrated-needing a direct path to offer a sale on a product and manage it. Each sales lead followed their process without corporate guidance.
Zones wanted to be able to search for a streamlined sale, with follow-up and product suggestion modeling, to further increase sales opportunities.
Zones realized that this was a problem within their organization and brought our small team on board to review roadblocks and consolidate customized workflows that employees were implementing.
My role and teams involved.
My role was as a senior UX designer under a director lead.
This 3-month project entailed eight individual interview sessions with senior leadership, four requirement visualization workshops with various teams within Zones, and heuristic analysis of current customized sales applications.
After the delivery of designs, we also studied click-through patterns and task analysis defined by various teams within the organization.
The solution
The project’s goal was to develop a solution that would eliminate ad-hoc solutions. Their previous solution was outdated, ready for a complete systems upgrade.
As a UX designer, an analysis of all order processing systems aligned to CRM and product sales management was created for improvements.
Upon completing UX research, we defined a series of personas that could validate scenario-based engineering to define unique and overlapping usage patterns within the current UI to align with revised customization.
Upon completing UX research, we defined a series of personas that could validate scenario-based engineering experience to define unique and overlapping usage patterns within the current UI to align with revised customization.
After the delivery of designs, we also studied click-through patterns and task analysis defined by various teams within the organization
Once the prototype was complete, we had senior leadership review the build aligned to the personas- to drive understanding of the various team needs for further analysis and testing of the prototype throughout the organization.
The learnings
Zones experienced extreme growth due to Microsoft partnerships. When you experience extreme growth at a fast rate, the fastest and cost-effective model usually wins.
But with all things, utilizing tools such as persona development and “day in the life” storytelling -optimized solutions easily emerge.
The Zones project proved to me the importance of following best practices while researching current solutions.
You have to give your user a voice, even if it’s frustration, it’s solvable.
