My design partner and I determined this was a “discovery project” and created a UX plan to articulate how we would tackle it. The plan outlined the research we would conduct and how data would be synthesized. Stakeholders were able to agree on the purpose of the research and we had a clear roadmap for what would be accomplished.
We talked with stakeholders and business partners from several areas of the organization. The sales process touches many facets of the business, each with their own initiatives and goals. My partner and I got an overview of how all of these initiatives come together to affect agents.
Stakeholder interviews revealed the home office was working off of assumptions about agents in the field and often treating hearsay as fact. Capturing the agent’s point of view was imperative.
We narrowed down our target users to two role types: agents who work with a customer over the course of weeks or months and agents who make many single-appointment sales calls in a day. Both groups could benefit from tools that store and track customer data and offer easy access to information about a variety of products.
A semi-structured interview style let us delve into details about agents’ daily tasks and left room for free-form discussion about pain points and stopgaps.
We grouped user behaviors, motivations, and values and used an affinity map to help spot the patterns. Research revealed that, regardless of job role, agents had similar needs and were performing similar tasks.
Archetypes proved to be the best way to model the information. Personas would come into play later, when scope had been narrowed and the details of the user’s needs could be explored more thoroughly. Archetypes set the stage for these future personas and helped give us a high level view of who our users are.
We distilled user research findings to create a clear visual outline of the agency sales process. This provided a base to plot the behaviors of each archetype, supplemented with their goals and resulting emotional states. From this, we created a prioritized list of recommendations that would improve the user’s workflow.
Journey maps helped us craft a concise and visually compelling story that communicated our findings to stakeholders across the organization.
We presented our recommendations to stakeholders and other interested business partners. We clearly highlighted critical pain points and laid out recommendations ranging from quick wins to ideas that would initiate spin-off projects. The format enabled the group to collectively discuss opportunities for improving overall user experience, as well as sparking ideas to make changes within their own departments.
