During my time at Evisions, I was given the opportunity to lead design of a customer-facing application to be employed within CADMUS via the Intercom chat messaging tool.
This project significantly improved my ability to design for customer interactions with users who were new and inexperienced with the product.
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Evisions had just finished development on the MVP for their new higher education data reporting tool, CADMUS. New users would need to be onboarded.
(In case you're curious, CADMUS stands for Clear Analytical Data Management User System.)
CADMUS helps IT admins do three things: set up sites and accounts for users, connect data sources to the system, and create CSV reports from those data sources.
I conducted several stakeholder interviews with internal employees to understand the potential user base. Much of this information informed my future design process.
I interviewed internal stakeholders from all areas of the company - from upper management and those in executive roles to the CADMUS developers, product managers, and members of the customer support team.
I wanted to interview stakeholders from multiple areas of the company to gather insight from multiple perspectives and gather a wider distribution of data. I also wanted to understand their underlying motivations so I could achieve the best result possible: a viable product feature that helped future CADMUS users.
After gaining an informed understanding of the internal stakeholders' goals, the Senior UX Designer and I began building automated chat flows that supported these goals and delivered the best experience to future users.
As UX Designers, our job is to set the tone and design the experience that supports that tone. We did it through conscious design choices that supported the user's journey.
For example, we took screenshots of the CADMUS user interface and used InVision to place post-it notes in areas of opportunity for engagement. These would ideally lead to those much-coveted moments of delight for our future users.
We built this workflow based on the information architecture that I mapped out previously. You can view it here.
After research and prototyping, it was time to do the work. We built the chatbot and product tour functionality using Intercom, an industry-standard customer messaging application.
Though the chatbot isn't a truly finished product (it never is), we treat this opportunity as a chance to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of self-service via Evisions' CADMUS product.
This experience allowed me to better understand how proper user-centered research is done - and how a UX team of two can accomplish just about anything given enough resources.
With the right designer, you can do just about anything. It's time to hire someone who knows the science of human-centered design.
