User Experience Designer
Co-Product Owner*
2.0 / Live
2023 - 2025 Ongoing
1 User Experience Designer
1 User Interface Designer
1 Product Owner
1 Data Analyst
Development Engineering Team
2 Champions
Discovery
Transformation
Redesign
Dashboard
Stakeholders
Prioritization
Business
I had joined slightly before 1.0 was ready to be shipped to our users, but it was quite apparent what they wanted from the application had changed. The overall goal of opportunity mining (OM for short) was still the same, being to help with transfer pricings (TP for short) win rate for new or existing clients within the firm that have yet to be engaged for work.
On our new design sprint with users and champions involved, we found these particular issues, among minor problems regarding UI and UX, to be the cause of the applications low usage.
These issues weren't the only problem.
An updated workflow was in place due to the nature of how OM worked, or at least how the Partners envisioned when identifying leads.
"The process is more of an organic one, where we talk to one another to see if these clients are suitable. It's all about connections and relationships as well."
From what we understood, the main OM process was that Partners would meet with other Business Unit (BU for short) Partners first. They would then discuss which clients and leads the other BU Partner works with has potential. After that, the TP Partner decides whether or not it is worth TP team's effort to follow up on an opportunity before assigning them to Managers. It also didn't necessarily mean if the other BU Partner told them it was a lost cause, they would immediately give up on the lead. (Refer to New Userflow visual)
We ran through the design sprint and had a solution ready to go, but when getting feedback from our Champions, it seemed that what they wanted had once again changed. This was not a big issue since the development sprints had not started, but ironing these out would cause changes in the design.
The landing page dashboard was deemed the highest priority, since the Partners were the main users of OM. That was where we started, eventually creating the other pages which tackled the new workflow and issues they had highlighted.
In order to make sure what we had matched what they wanted, armed with a high-fi mockup and prototype, we tested them with a few Partners and Managers. These were a few insights we had moving forward.
Since target priority was based on an algorithm that was initially used to prioritize targets, many users found it not to be a good indicator of which lead had a higher chance of being won therefore it was removed.
Total revenue was an initial idea from Partners. They wanted to see a value or ROI in terms of how much time the team spent doing opportunity mining. This fell through as tracking the returns could not be done due to the nature of how OM worked.
Just having a place to see the structured updates and comments weren't enough, they needed to be able to see prior year comments left by their team or whoever worked with the client.
Clients under other Business Unit Partners had to be split by sector as each TP Partner also had their own sectors they were in charge of.
TP already has a PowerBI dashboard to track progress of their managers progress breakdown.
The last insight was overlooked at the start, seeing as PowerBI was an external tool that had not much relation to our team at the time of OMs initial creation. We did end up working it into our design and users were okay with how the information was presented, seeing as the PowerBI dashboard was hard to digest.
Users were agreeable with our proposed solution, and we were about to begin development. But at this point a new stakeholder had joined the conversation, and to them it didn't make sense to create a brand new dashboard from scratch due to costs and time. Especially since it was essentially replicating what the PowerBI dashboard already does.
We had to consider this and it made sense not to go ahead with the elaborate dashboard, given the resources we had to put in just to create it. We had an idea of somehow linking the PowerBI dashboard onto OM, but this involved extra costs as well and an intricacy our developer team wasn't too sure about.
We highlighted this to our Champions and TP Partners, they were agreeable to cut back on costs by having a simple clickable link to the PowerBI dashboard if they wanted a deeper dive. Our stakeholder was pleased too!
So in the end, we had to scrap the leads funnel section on our landing page dashboard. The other widgets remained along with the remaining OM functionalities.
Well as many other UX designers, I would want to try my best to accommodate users wants and needs, and prioritize those features that are essential to them.
But as a growing designer who is slowly seeing the bigger picture and focusing on the product as a whole, keeping the business side of things in mind is important.
Cutting costs wherever possible might make more sense not only for the business itself, but also to our users; Especially if they are able to leverage other resources they have at their fingertips.
Does this mean I should always look at the business side of how applications affect costs and time savings? Yes, but not all the time. It is good to keep it in mind and to ensure these things are known to the team, the users, and the stakeholders, before making decisions.
We still shipped a working solution that caters to all our user's needs. Was it the way we had initially planned? No. But that doesn't mean it wasn't an effective solution. We managed to solve the problem while satisfying our users, so I would call that a win.
OM has only recently been rolled out and while we are still gathering data, we do hope the usage of the application will increase as compared to 1.0 where it was barely being used.
of lead in OM has progressed since the release of 2.0
