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UX fixes to reduce company costs and save users time

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Product

The operations department and international career coaching team had found a problem in the web-based product that was wasting users' time and costing the company money. Career coaching participants were frustrated and confused by the user portal's dashboard. Internal staff (the career coaches) were having to explain CTAs and what the intended next steps were. The coaches were having to spend extra time explaining the user interface, and user journey on the webpages, instead of performing career coaching.

My Role and Execution

  • Research: reviewed user journeys. I watched dozens of recorded user journeys through a behavioral data anlytics tool to identify the biggest pain points for the users.

  • Listening tour with internal stakeholders. I interviewed 20 global team members (career coaches) around the world, to learn about their experience with the web-based product and the time it was taking them to orient new clients to the user portal.

  • Limited scope of the project. We needed immediate solutions to this problem. We did not need to or have time to do a full redesign of the user portal dashboard. After watching dozens of user session recordings, I isolated the issue to the left panel of the dashboard. With the discovery and solutioning done, I then focused on making that webpage's left panel more clear for all the users. Working with the design team, I homed in on how many and which specific calls to actions (CTAs) to include: removing those that were not relevant or applicable at that time and simplifying the user journey.

Challenges & Achievements

Challenges

  • Frustrated users. Both the internal staff, the career coaches, and the users were frustrated with the web portal's dashboard. Users would complete a step, and then get blocked on the next step.

  • Limited time to solve the problem. We initially discussed redesigning the entire dashboard. However, coaches needed a solution that would work quickly for all users worldwide. Re-doing the content specific to all the different languages and the focus areas in those countries would take months.

Achievements

  • 3 easy steps for the users. The solution I developed with the UX/UI designer severely limited the number of CTAs and steps from the previous and simplifed the user flow to 3 easy steps.

  • Demos of the upgraded dashboard. I recorded demos of the new dashboard. I did pre-release video conferences, walking key stakeholders through the changes and flow, which led to smoother adoption.

  • Satisfied stakeholders and users. After the feature release, 75% of the coaches responded that the UX changes had significantly enhanced the user experience.

  • Saving the company money and time for all users. The Operations team, the career coaches, and the users all voiced appreciation for the dashboard improvements. The coaches were able to trim a minimum of 15 minutes off the introductory call time, which saved the company money. The coaches and users could now focus on engaging with and benefiting from the digital product itself and its features.