CCC's Executive Dashboard

GOAL

Within 2 months, examine, determine, and communicate the most common usage flows on ED, the most used tabs and their significance, a specific tab’s impact and usage, the importance of emails and their utility, and a mobile solution’s needs and requirements.

PROCESS AND FINDINGS

User Research, User Interviews, User Surveys, Personas, User Journey Maps

After our pilot interview with the stakeholders, including the CCC VP pioneering ED, they helped us overcome the initial challenge of getting access to the website’s main users: 15 of the company’s top management. After being invited via email, they all participated in a 30 minute online semi-structured interview/contextual inquiry, followed by a 4 minute survey We chose interviews because they were the easiest to do remotely and we wanted to hear the users voice their opinions instead of just running a remote abstracted usability test. The survey helped us validate our interview results and provide additional quantitative insights.

As each interview passed, we started doing Thematic Analysis on all the gathered interview results. We read through all the data adding codes to what we saw was interesting. As more interviews passed by, we started looking for recurring codes in our user conversations and started grouping them into Themes that are broader and involve active interpretation of the codes. After completing all the interviews we had identified about 17 major themes and numerous user recommendations.

Following each interview we also mapped per-user journey maps that helped us visualize flows, highlight our codes, and create our personas and top level journey maps.

We extracted and focused on 2 main Personas that represented the majority of ED users. The Personas main user behavioral patterns, and system goals helped us answer “Who are we designing for?” and ultimately assisted in empathizing with and aligning strategy and goals to specific user groups. We found out that, in the utmost brevity, the Report Consumer persona was focused on report data, details, and communication, where as the Chartable Consumer persona was a multi-tasking user who relied heavily on top-level info and deviations to take action.

We then moved on to creating two main top-level User Journey Maps and one alternative journey. These maps were extremely helpful at illustrating the mental model of the system in the user’s mind by dissecting the activities they performed at each stage, and the feelings they encountered during and after using ED. The journey also mapped out opportunities that embody some of the potential solutions for pain points at each stage.

The in-depth version of the above process, analysis, and findings of our ED User Research were presented to the stakeholders. Our conclusions revealed that the primary focus of ED should be on ensuring seamless and easy access to reports. We also proposed addressing multiple experience-impacting factors, such as better on-chart descriptions, improved visibility plus rankings for notifications, and sufficient training, to name a few, as a means of strengthening user adoption and retention, and increasing their trust in the system.

Since 80% of the polled participants said they’d use an ED mobile solution if provided, with more favor for tablets over phones, and an emphasis on the need to strictly use it for quick access to reports and the latest numeric KPIs only, we were able to divert more design recommendations to that direction.

THEN WHAT?

TOOLS UTILIZED