OVERVIEW

Timeline

UI designer partnered with a UX architect on this project. I participated in research and design, as well as advising on best design practices.

Team

• 2 Product Designers

• Product Manager

• 6 Developers

OPPORTUNITY

Can we create a simplified tool for affiliates who don’t do much work for us without expending man hours explaining our systems.

We found that SMS Assist’s systems were complicated for the users. They had been designed and built under the assumption that users (Affiliates) were working with us all the time and any gaps could be trained or learned over time. However we realized that covers only 80% of our work orders. The other 20% were users who don’t do much work for us, thus found our tools a hassle.

OUTCOME

Higher adoption & timely invoices increased revenue in the residential business vertical of $400k, while the commercial gained $500k

Affiliate Lite now allowed affiliates to enter invoices directly, preventing invoices to be misplaced, which helped Operations. We ended up having a 100% compliance from Emergency-Sourced Affiliates when entering these invoicing data. We went from 0 compliances for invoice creation to 100%. Furthermore, 6 months after launch we saw an increase in adoption rate from our neglected vendors in remote areas. Before Affiliate Lite 12% of work orders were accepted in time, now it’s 96%. Finally, we saw an increase from 20% to 70% of work orders invoiced in time.

THE USER

Our product wanted to focus on the Emergency-Sourced Affiliates, who accounted for 20% of our work orders.

We have 3 different types of Affiliates:

• Emergency Sourced Affiliates: Affiliates that don’t receive many work orders from SMS. These are one-offs, with no existing relationships, thus no time for training.

• Low Volume Affiliates: These affiliates receive a few work orders per year.

• Major National Companies: These are big companies that would rarely use SMS’s services.

DESIGN PROCESS

DISCOVERY

We had to identify the minimum business requirements. We didn’t want the affiliates to do anything unnecessary. We had to ask ourselves “What’s the minimum amount of info we can get on a WO that would work for operations”. So we specifically talked to vendors who didn’t have a relationship with SMS or our systems. To better understand what would make sense to them intuitively. We asked them what they would do if there was no system. What information would they send? What verbiage they used. We had to differentiate SMS jargon and industry terms. This information allowed us to come up with a workflow and design.

We then focused on the onboarding. We identified the one-off emergency vendors we needed to work for us. And we needed to make it easy to add these emergency affiliates to our system and dispatch them. Utilizing our new “Affiliate Lite” process and not the standard process.

The last part of discovery involved us learning that we had created a process for affiliates to agree to terms and conditions, but the workaround the “Emergency Team” was using by-passed these terms and conditions. So before this product, emergency vendors didn’t have as much legal protection. So part of our goal was to provide more legal protection.

WIREFRAMES

FINAL DESIGN

After creating hi-fidelity designs we went through multiple rounds of testing to ensure the core requirements of the wireframes translated. And that both web and mobile designs were user friendly.