Design Thinking Innovation

Reflection – Visualization

Challenge    I am a Business Analyst of my organization’s IT department.  We were approached by the  Sales team to enhance an application that they use for updating sales activities after visit to  clients, create hardware configurations according to client’s requirements, submits the  configuration for approval and processing,  and send sales proposals to clients for  confirmation.  This application on tablet (e.g. iPad) was developed by external vendor and is  to provide a one-stop tool for the Sales team to improve engagement with clients.  Over the  years, with ad-hoc enhancements added to the application, it is not as user-friendly, long  response time to navigate between tabs and every application update would affect its  reliability.    The objective of this project is to overhaul the application with better navigation experience,  faster response time and robust reliability.    Selection    The team’s priority is to first focus on the processes when the Sales person interacts with  their clients. We will go over the engagement process, and observe how the application can  help the sales process (for the Sales person and the client) and the information that they input  into the application can help the Sales Operation and Finance department process the orders  and invoice the clients respectively.  This will address the users experience issue.    With this in mind, we decided to use the Visualization tool to break down the problems and  opportunities into different sections.  We hope this will uncover areas that we can add to  improve the application, understand which portion of the current application that are giving  the Sales team inconveniences, and how other teams (Sales Operation and Finance) utilize  the data from the application, i.e. process and bill the orders.    Application    In Visualization chapter of the Designing for Growth book by Wan Duncan and Alexander Grace,  we will begin with “What is”.  We organized a workshop for the Sales team to provide  feedback.  During the workshop, they wrote their feedback on post-it pads and pasted it on  whiteboard.  One feedback per piece.  We group their feedback by processes, for example,  find information of products to create or edit configurations, create record of new customers,  edit sales activities, retrieve existing customers’ data.  We also have Sales Operation and  Finance departments to participate as they requested for additional and accurate information  to process and bill orders.    After the workshop, we used the feedback to next stage of “What if” where we sketch out on  large flip charts how to organize the navigation tabs according to the sales process, how to  display information for selection during input, sequence the data fields for easy input during  configuration and create record of new customers and edit sales activities.

Besides fixing the present inadequacies of the application, we also added enhancements, for  example, changing the fonts and background colors, new display of products with search and  left-right navigation features to give the application a more updated layout.    Using the sketch from “What if”, we handed to a team member to create wireframes and  design application prototype.  This will mimic the navigation experience for “What wows” to  make the concept tangible.    The next stage is “What works” where we arranged another workshop with the Sales, Sales  Operation and Finance team to present the prototype.  We had role-play to test out the new  design and change the wireframe and prototype onsite from their feedback.  This iterative  approach saves time instead of changing design during development and everyone can  visualize what to expect in the new application.    Insights    Applying the Visualization tool approach is putting the users first in revamping the application.   The process to gather information, get feedback, design prototype etc. could take longer than  usual approach but was helping us with uncovering more areas to improve the application.   For example, the sequence and process to input information to create a new customer’s  record could save the Sales team tremendous amount of time if we can pre-populate some  fields.    The Sales team finds using this new approach took up a lot of their time as most of the time  they are out visiting clients.  They appreciates the effort we made to gather their feedback  and recommended for future discussions on application re-design, we could utilize a few of  their team members at the initial stage to gather feedback and have all come together when  the mockup is ready for them to review.    We also need to be mindful of bringing too many people to a workshop as different teams  could have needs that another team may find it not applicable to them.  We could have divide  to sub-groups for “targeted” approach.    Approach    This is our first attempt in using Design Thinking activities/tools.  We can improve in managing  the workshop for smaller groups to better manage the feedback from multiple teams.   We  need to thoroughly review the insights gained and take it into account when we use other  approaches of Design Thinking for other projects.

