Customer 360

Introduction

In June 2019 I went to work for three months in Singapore within a team of IT specialist that were part of the hub of big french industrial group. They were brewing internally most of the software they needed. They were the only regional hub of the company doing that rather than relying on shelf products. This peculiarity raised some interest in my office in Paris.

They had little design capabilities which initiated a collaboration. After a break and my return in Paris I continued to work for two month on the subject before handling it over. This is the tale of this project.

Find the right focus

The brief

The defined project I embarked on was requesting help on the merging of three existing tools to shape a new CRM platform.

Adjusting the approach

During the first week I conducted stakeholder interviews and a few user interviews of the existing platform. My first framing was attempting to push the perfect design project where we go and meet users, shape personas, roll out user scenarios and transform them onto low-fidelity mock-ups.

Such framing wasn’t taking in account the organisation I’m working for. There was very short deadlines and they needed to start developing new components very fast. These teams were little accustom to design methodologies and design deliverables thus this was also an opportunity to adjust my approach. This led to sketch first user-flows and rapidly test ideas with the team responsible for the development of the platform.

Thus I decided to build low-fidelity mock-ups that would ignite feedback and refine the core challenges we needed to solve before my departure.

A unique access point

The first core challenge that I identified was to converge and have a unique access point for the available information. In other words, we needed to force a single user-flow to access a specific information. This challenges implied to rethink a new search engine¹ as well as a new information architecture.

Rethink the information architecture

Manage complexity

After several weeks of work and different unsuccessful attempts to suggest a new information architecture. I made a proposition which generated a lot of feedback from the developer of the solution². These developers where also taking part in the product ownership and where key levers to move forward the product. According to them I had simplified too much and my prioritisation was not suiting identified requirements. I suggested then that we work on a spreadsheet to decipher correctly the information architecture.

A solid base

Later in October when I was back in France, while collaborating with a Chinese colleague who helped me a lot I suggested the following new architecture³.  This new information architecture enable a clear and clean navigation throughout the contents and their pages.

This new information architecture unlocked the dead ends I was stuck in to propose a unifying layout for the product.

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A new navigation principle

Thanks to this new information architecture I managed to elaborate a new organisation of the tool and reassess its navigation principles. The following examples⁴ shows different state of the search user flow I described to give as much specification as possible to the development team.

This new information architecture unlocked as well the fixation of a layout for the page presenting information about customers. The following example⁵ shows the project section of a prospect customer.

The result

Thanks to my work, the teams in Singapore have been able to build their new CRM on a new base. My work resulted in :

• A new information architecture.
• A revisited navigation principle.
• A new visual design suited for many use-cases though it can’t be considered as a design system work.
• IT teams who participated a lot more in the design process of a new application.

These teams now see the importance of involving designers upfront when they want to build or improve a tool they are owning. Indeed a new designer was involved to follow up this project in 2020 to pursue the work I’ve been doing. Tests were conducted with users in Australia and met success according to my former manager.

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To conclude this case study, I would like to share three interface explorations that ultimately became irrelevant in relation to the key issues we identified throughout the project.