Unified Platform

Background

Over time it is natural for a portfolio of applications to grow and adapt. When you take a company through 2 acquisitions, that application portfolio can become excessively large and unwieldy. The need to consolidate applications into a more unified experience for our internal users and clients became evident as our company grew and matured.

Objective

Improve and consolidate a suite of internal tools to enhance internal operational efficiency and provide an access point for a self-service offering for clients.

Hypothesis (a): Consolidating internal “run-the-business” applications into one platform will cause significant improvements in: 1) Usability, 2) Satisfaction, 3) Error Rate, and 4) Productivity

    • Sales

    • Operations

    • Clients

    • UX

    • Product

    • Front-end Engineering

    • Back-end Engineering

    • Leadership

    • Marketing

    • Enablement

Something Interesting

Through time and acquisition the number of internal tools used to run the business had swelled to over 200 applications.  These applications were often separately built or built in clusters to service particular products, actions, and functions.  Research was leveraged to identify primary applications to be consolidated into a main operational platform and create a unified experience for end-users, both internal and external. 

Method

By using a variety of techniques, processes, and actions, the Research Team and I sought to understand and enhance the tools for core offering operations. Techniques were vast and varied, but primarily fell into one of three functional areas:

Discovery

Generative

Evaluative

Procedure: Discovery

Our main goals for this discovery were rooted in observational study as we set out to map the current internal processes and then combine that with competitive offerings. As our solution was going to change the behavior of our core operational teams, we had to have a firm understanding of each step and pain point, conducting detailed task analysis that would drive shared service blueprints. These were complemented by Client Satisfaction and Internal Employee survey initiatives that we conducted periodically.

Methods:

  • Contextual Inquiry

  • Task Analysis

  • Competitive Analysis

  • Service Blueprinting

  • Journey Mapping

  • Longitudinal Survey Evaluation

  • Focus Groups

  • Workshop Facilitation

  • Heuristic Evaluation

Service Blueprint

Client Satisfaction Survey

Competitive Analysis

Procedure: Generative

With an understanding of the current space, our teams pivoted towards materializing ideas and needs through various generative exercises. We brought users directly into our process by giving them multiple opportunities for generating functional requirements, identifying pain points, and drawing proposed solutions.

  • Participatory Design Facilitation

  • Need Analysis/JTBD

  • Card Sorting

  • Functional Requirements Generation

  • Interaction Design Wireframing/Wireflowing

Functional Needs Analysis/Card Sorting

Participatory Design

Procedure: Evaluative

The implementation of a new operational backbone for the company is one that is not launched lightly. Ongoing user-testing and validation checks were constant as we periodically and continuously vetted and validated designs and solutions.

  • Design Validation

    • User Testing

    • Process Validation

    • Scenario Validation

  • Information Architecture Testing

  • Alpha/Beta/UAT

  • Behavior Tracking & Analysis

Information Architecture Testing

Prototype Testing

Alpha Testing in Staging

Results & Discussion

Through constant iteration and implementation, several applications and functionalities within the unified platform have been implemented. This massive pivot in the corporate offering is continually being implemented but launch is schedule for the end of 2025.

Gains have already been realized in major KPI measures outline in Hypothesis(a) with improvements in 1) Usability, 2) Satisfaction, 3) Error Rate, and 4) Productivity