Transforming an outdated internal tool to unlock new business opportunities.

HP Review console

Role: Research owner, UX/IX contributor

Timeline: 2 months

SITUATION

The Review Console is an internal tool for HP Staff. It is the space to intake orders, track files associated with orders, highlight progress, and submit files to the factory. Currently it is only being used for the Molded Fiber business vertical but is intended to scale for other verticals in the future.

A request came to the design team to address some “quick wins” design engineers needed to better use it. As designers do, we investigated the quick wins and found an opportunity to solve a larger problem.

Now the challenge was to balance the needs for short term improvements on less than ideal solutions with a longer term strategy to create software solutions that will improve processes and enable specific workflows across many verticals.

TASK

I conducted initial interviews with Molded Fiber users, created workflows with the team based on those, and I created initial personas. Some highlights are:

  • There were clear adoption barriers

  • Users are spending a lot of time on manual tasks/workarounds

  • There were several critical handoff points where info needed to be preserved

  • Multiple personas with multiple other tools may need to interact with the review console.

We then held a week-long workshop with key stakeholders that I helped set up and facilitate. What came of that were 4 outcomes which branched into a short term solution (our quick wins) and long term solution. The idea was the short term would take the low hanging fruit while the long term solution fleshed out some of the more complex problems. The workshop outcomes to be addressed were:

  • Workflow+people+priority (3 key pieces of info users need to complete order)

  • Include clear and concise alerts

  • Support robust communication and documentation

  • Consider permissions / user access control

Capture of the workflows I made in Miro

ACTION

Now that the long term goals were clarified and we felt we truly had a grasp on what would be most helpful for the short term, I created wireframes and prototypes:

In addition, the prototype from the workshop fed into a more fleshed out long term vision that I codesigned with my team:

I created and executed on a test plan for the usability of the short term solution to ensure our solutions were usable even with our constrained framework. In parallel, I created and executed on a test plan for concept validation of the long term solution. Here, we needed confirm the vision was aligned with the long term user need and uncover any gaps in terms of information architecture and adoption barriers.

For the short term solution we found usability improvements were needed for file management and factory submission. For the long term, we found gaps in our understanding of the order/project hierarchy, task assignments, and order priority.

RESULT

Short term solution:

  • Using our findings I iterated on the designs and handed off the final version of the short term changes to development. To ensure we are continually learning, I made a proposal for implementing Google Analytics tracking and presented it to product management.

Long term solution:

  • Before leaving the team, I iterated on the design for another round of concept validation. With this, in addition to the Google Analytics data from the live site, I hope we’ll have a good picture of the next steps needed to reach our long term solution.

Live site with implemented changes

Reflection

During this project I really learned to question: What are quick wins? Are there truly “quick” wins or are they all smaller chunks of a bigger vision? We also had many moments where I was thankful we were a highly collaborative team and involved stakeholders in our process, as they were later bought in to the design because they trusted what went into it.