UNIGROUP QDIVISION

I joined the QDivision team as the first senior practitioner tasked with elevating the UX maturity of the team as well as the company.  Something I learned and holds true to this day is that every designer learns the well known methodologies enough to recite them back to you at a moments notice.  Yet, young designers struggled to put it into practice.  UX is messy, and they learned a very linear process that doesn't exist in the real world.  I designed a process that worked for the product team structure and agile delivery methodology, which is often messy as well and done differently at every company.  

I was also tasked with creating the "central nervous system" for the company.  An enterprise level logistics tracking and reporting tool that connected all other products and users into a common interface.  I learned shortly after, that the company attempted this previously and it was summarily rejected by our internal users, and cost the company millions in development resources and time. 

Faced with a skeptical group of users, afraid that we were repeating the same mistakes of the past, I began user interviews to understand their needs, pain points, motivations and goals.  I brought the PMs in as well to create a shared understanding of the users.  Our users felt the product team was arrogant and didn't listen to them.  They were also extremely efficient at using the antiquated technology and creating workarounds.  We couldn't simply rely on new and trendy things we thought were great improvements.  Change aversion was extremely high and quantifiable in real money losses with slowed production.  Still, the learning curve made replacing or hiring on more workers a four month process to get up to speed.  We had to come up with a solution. 

I bridged the trust gap by creating a feedback loop, co-creating with them in real time.  They were no longer spectators in the creation of a product that directly affected them.  While gathering their insights and feedback, the product team would perform several rounds of whiteboarding to maintain both technical feasibility and business goals.  It was also the first time the PMs and engineers were involved in this process, creating a desire to really center the user's voice and create a product they enjoyed using.  

I worked with a junior visual designer to create the high fidelity wireframes concurrently with the research.  He gets all the credit for pushing the pixels while I translated the findings into a final product.  This saved time and kept us on pace to meet our delivery goals.  Also, much of the UI elements were part of the third party we partnered with to create the basic functionality we needed before consuming their work and customizing completely for our users.  

We were able to reduce the onboarding time for new planners to weeks instead of months.  We saw a reduction in user error, which resulted in more accurate shipping and less dropped loads.