Barbara Inostroza

Dashboard - Mail Management

Objective: To design a dashboard to visualize data on mail management in customer service companies.

Client: Banking, telecommunications, and retail companies, including others, with high customer message flow.

Users: Users: Sales customer service teams (including leaders), responses to requests, among other topics.

Final product: High-fidelity mockup, animations, advertising material, and responsive mail.

DataViz

Empathize

Semi-structured interviews with teams and team leaders.

Objectives:

Building persons or proto-persons through the information obtained.
Define overall work dynamics of customer service teams.
Define which methods of customer mail management they usually use.
Develop a supervisory and management indicators list that can be applied to their work dynamics.

Interview script design

Questions ideation
Questions and topics review with team stakeholders
Application of 4 mock interviews
Script adjustment and draft questions

Interview format application

To contribute to the user empathizing phase, the interviews were to be conducted by the designer plus a member of the development team as an assistant.
Tools: Printed interviews and voice recorder.

4 Corporations 2 Banking 2 Telecommunications

Users testers

Team member interviews

Interview formats (including notes)

Interview conclusions

1.-The most important work dynamics are team meetings with different objectives according to their frequency.

2.-Team leaders need metrics enabling them to monitor and develop work plans according to their teams performance.

3.-Team members need data on their customer service management to improve their performance.

Proto-person / persons

Person profile was proposed first as a hypothesis and then updated with the interview information.

Design phase

This phase began by determining the indicators and data available to devise the visualizations.
Design scopes and limits were defined: a number of visualizations per dashboard and the amount of presented data, to simplify product usability.

Project formulation

What?

Web App with a set of dashboards that complement each other in function, but with different data visualization objectives on mail management. As a whole, they should extract relevant information with the least effort in analysis, usability, and time spent by the user.

Why?

It was determined that customer service teams in companies need to develop strategies based on customer case management indicators. However, they do not count with the time to analyze and extract relevant information from complex visualizations (in terms of data quantity and usability).

What is this for?

To increase the quantity and quality of cases managed by the teams, thus improving customer satisfaction levels. This has a direct impact on the period goals, resulting in increased profits for both the company and the teams.

Design proposal

Working with up to 3 types of visualizations presented at the same time in each dashboard or panel, to control visual stimuli and focus analysis on a narrow context.

Maintain the data visualization mantra: Overview - Zoom and filter - Details on demand

Focus design proposals based on the context of daily use in the teams' work dynamics.

11 dashboard proposals with specific objectives each, of which 8 were taken to the development phase.

Analysis panel by executive

Cognitive Walkthrough usability testing

Methodological references: NNgroup / Interaction Design Foundation

This test mapped the tasks and steps which could be performed with the features within each designed dashboard. Mapping was organized using branched flow diagrams, to evaluate possible action alternatives on the tasks within the interfaces.

Users: 2 per task, with a basic data visualization interface experience level.
Tests were performed using an under-development app version, with customized tester accounts.

Login action flow

Cognitive Walkthrough testing conclusions

1.- Process resulted in a component, feature, and style redesign within each design proposal, to improve data visualization and user comprehension of the data.
2.- It was decided to make a design work focused on the explanations of concepts within the page, namely: Assistance material, concepts explanatory tooltips, among others.

Heuristic usability testing

Methodological references: NNgroup / Nielsen Paper

This test was conceived as a second testing stage in which tester users were asked to use the panels and look for possible problems affecting any of the 10 usability principles pointed out by Nielsen. The feedback document was modified to provide instructions with clear examples according to each user's context.

Users: 5 to 7 per panel, medium-high experience level.
The tests were performed using an under-development app version, running on specially configured tester accounts.

Results: Panels were evaluated according to problem type, affected principle, and each user's perceived level of priority. On this basis, several design problems were detected, as well as some bugs in some features, and explanatory texts that needed to be edited, among other elements to improve the experience.