An ambitious passionate designer desiring to dissolve complexities. Looking forward for a place where I can contribute my skills and explore new challenging works.
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IT Concierge
One-stop shop for all your IT matters
Role - Design Lead
ABOUT
A Concierge service
The employees of Rolls-Royce Power Systems across the world today are confronted with many different channels and multiple touch points to address their various IT matters. For some issues, users have to contact their IT coordinators and for few others, the service desk. There are often cases where the users are confused whom to contact for a topic. Currently, calls and emails are the two channels by which users get in touch with the IT service desk. Maintaining a service desk is highly resource-intensive and hence more expensive, while emails tend to lack swift responses.
Hence focusing on the real needs of the users, we aim to provide a concierge like experience. In a nut shell, IT concierge is a single point of contact for RRPS employees for all their IT matters.
This entire project happened during Covid-19 pandemic. Different alterations and experiments were tried out to get the best results through every stage of this project.
PROJECT METHODOLOGY
Discover, Design, Deliver...
Design Thinking
RRPS follows SAP's Design thinking framework, which is based on the 3 staged Standford D.'School's Design Thinking process - Discover, Design and Deliver. This design thinking framework was designed to accommodate both traditional and agile projects. This approach solves problems by addressing the pains and needs of the customer and business. By having a design thinking mindset, a multidisciplinary team can build solutions for complex and wicked problems in a technically feasible, commercially sustainable and emotionally meaningful way.
RESEARCH
How we understood what they want...
IT Concierge project was focussed not just over a single region but rather over varied user groups spread across all the continents, adding their region-specific complexities to our assumptions. To understand these needs, we divided ourselves into 3 teams working on 3 different time zones. Our research team comprised of 6 researchers, 2 for EMEAR, APAC and the USA regions each. Also, a slightly broadened user interview guideline was prepared to accommodate the diversity of these regions.
All the user interviews were conducted on Skype considering the pandemic situation. A total of 29 interviews were conducted covering 4 different user groups across 3 different time zones.
SYNTHESIS
Churning raw data into meaningful insights
The entire synthesis was done remotely. Ideation and brainstorming workshops were conducted within the team as well as with the stakeholders using tools like Invision Freehand and breakout groups via Teams. As we progressed with the research, we slowly started observing that the insights were shaping into two different user groups, nothing but personas. Personas are fictive characters who are representative of a user group. They help the Stakeholders to understand which person you have in mind when you make decisions.
Personas also act as a reminder for the team to validate if we are focusing on the customer and solving their issues. We named them "The Resolver Ally" and "The Dependent Milan".
Personas
RESOLVER ALLY
31/F
"Curiosity is always rewarding"
Job Title -
Sales Service Manager
General environment​
I have an engineering background and I am responsible for after-sales service, spare parts and workshop. I lead a team of 13 employees and take care of all their IT needs. During this Covid -19 situation, I work only one day from the office and the rest four days from home.
Personal goals
- Seamless service operation
- Make sure my team is well motivated
- Achieve sales target
Motivation
- Self learning
- Troubleshooting and finding the solution gives me joy
Frustration
- Lengthy process
- No transparency in the communication, for e.g., who is responsible for what.
- I am not empowered to solve the issues that i face.
- Dependencies on the individuals (IT coordinators) sometimes results in human errors.
- With the current IT landscape, I find it difficult to perform simple tasks like installing software, ordering a laptop or a mouse etc.
DEPENDENT MILAN
35/M
"I only want to focus on my work. Rest are not my headache"
Job Title -
Finance & Controlling
General environment​
I work with numbers. Every figure and minutes count for me.
I generate reports and analyse data for the management. I work with the Sales, Service and Quality department supporting them in measuring their KPIs.
Personal goals
- Provide best and fast support to my colleagues in other departments.
- Accurate analysis of data to make the right decision
Motivation
- Formulas to solution
- Good infrastructure
Frustration
- Long waiting time on Service desk hotline before I can reach an agent.
- I need to call the service desk quite often, because I do not know much about IT Tools and devices. And the tickets need too much time until it gets resolved. Once I needed 30 Minutes to inform that the Sales DB Software wouldn't work.
- Sometimes tickets get closed without any feedback or solution, hence I had to create a new one via the service desk again which again took a lot more time.
- I find it difficult to install softwares with the current IT landscape.
- I don't understand the technical explanations.
KEY INSIGHTS
User wishes and Pain points
- Users want the communication with IT team to be fast, well documented and transparent 24 x 7.
- Users are confused about which channel to contact the IT team, hence wish for a dedicated channel.
- Users prefer to use a self service system to raise ticket by themselves, for IT needs and smaller issues.
- Users prefer to use emails (to document their request) and calls(for urgent matters)
- Unable to reach service desk at peak hours due to different time zone, long waiting time.
- Slow resolution time and no transparency on the progress of the ticket.
- Dependency on the people rather than the system.
- Inconsistent and varied services across regions.
RRPS IT support - today
PROBLEM BRIEF
Our focus in this project
To create a responsive web application for the employees in Rolls-Royce Power System to tackle all their IT needs and requirements, hence providing an end to end concierge-like experience within the limitation of the current backend systems.
IDEATION
Ideas and their prioritisation
Ideation was majorly done virtually using different tools. This was the phase that got the most impact of remote working due to Pandemic. Through multiple workshops we were able to bring diverse ideas to the table. The core team members categorised these ideas and made realisable features along with acceptance criteria for each of them. These features were further scrutinised on the basis of business viability, user desirability as well as technical feasibility and were categorised into three levels of priority. The highest priority features were considered for the first Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
IT Concierge Conceptualisation
DESIGN SPRINT PLANNING
"Well planned is half done"
Once the initial ideas were conceptualised, information architecture was drafted. It helped us to communicate easily within the project team as well as to make a rough size estimation of the entire project. We sliced the overall MVP scope to smaller sections which could be accommodated into each sprint for 2 designers. Product owner and key stake holders were onboarded to our Sprint plan, thereby framing the first MVP.
Design Sprint Plan
We designed this heavily customised one-week design sprint plan to meet the project requirements and timeline. With such a sprint we were able to achieve,
- Easy and effective collaboration with teams across regions for maximum output.
- User validations across the continent provided quicker end user feedbacks.
- Multiple review sessions at various stages from product owners as well as co-designers.
- Fast and iterative detailing.
- Design readiness by the end of the week for every sprint.
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It took us only a total of 6 sprints to finish, the user validated and refined wireframes for the first MVP.
WIREFRAME AND PROTOTYPE
Time for some real hands-on work
A fast-paced phase involving 2 designers working for 12 hours, began with revisiting the user stories followed by creating task-flows and user-flows, wireframes and its prototyping. The wireframes were created in Sketch and prototyped in Invision. The wireframes were vetted by PO and other fellow designers, their feedbacks were collected, evaluated and incorporated before presenting it to the end-user for user validation.
Home screen
Search interaction
Software installation request
Create a ticket
Ticket history
Hover on the UI to view the interaction
USER VALIDATION
Let's listen to what they felt!
It was very important for us to collect feedback from users across the continents to iterate and improve our design. We made use of the "follow the sun approach" for user validation. Early in the morning, the prototypes were tested in Singapore, China and India, followed by Germany, France and Turkey during the daytime and finally Mankato in the late evening. All the three-time zones had 2 dedicated resources to conduct three user validation sessions each. All the validation notes were directly documented as comments in Invision.
As an experiment, we also tried offline validation sessions which turned out to be a huge success. We created a pool of users who were actively participating in the validation activities. Specially designed questionnaires and onboarding materials for commenting were created for offline validations. Offline validations of course lacked in the understanding of the soft behaviours of the users, but we were able to get volumes of vital inputs.
We were able to achieve a good balance between online and offline user validations to collect the final end-user feedbacks for our design.
All the feedbacks were further categorised, prioritised and incorporated into the wireframes by end of the fifth day of the sprint.
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VISUAL DESIGN
The next level of detailing!
The visual design was done using the Torque Design System of RRPS. Visual design including colour palette, interaction as well as icon styling were defined at component level within the design system.
When encountering any issue, users are empowered to fix it by themselves through Quick fixes. If the issue is complex, users can report the issue by themselves through Create a Ticket section easily.
A glance of user's open tickets as soon as they reach the home screen and a quick link to the Tickets section
Quick support for the common issues before contacting the IT team
Users can see the history of all the open and closed tickets in the tickets section of the IT Concierge
A Search to take the users to their destination quickly. Current issues relevant for the user are presented as Quick links.
Never miss any IT announcement
Multiple channels for the user to reach out to the IT team.
The status of the ticket can be easily tracked in ITC
From the IT store users can request hardware, software as well as permissions.
Smart features like auto-categories generated from keywords provided by the user help in faster ticket routing.
Users can order multiple software/hardware in a single request.
RESPONSIVENESS
Defining design across varied screen sizes
IT concierge was designed for all the employees of RRPS. It was important for the employees to access IT Concierge from any company device possible such as a mobile, tablet, laptop or desktop in any situation.
