Thomsons Online Benefits is a global benefits management and employee engagement software company.
Image by vectorjuice on Freepick
The Project
Building a product from scratch, which responds to different market needs, expectation and standards.
The Problem
How to build an MVP with the ambition to disrupt the market?
Challenges
Understanding market-specifics requirements
Absence of Business Requirements
Rules and Regulations
No data on usage from similar products
Legacy
The Process
I have been hired by Thomsons Online Benefits for a 6 months contract.
1.Strategy
In order to plan and drive the UX Research efficiently, I usually ask a set of questions, such as:
What is the company’s strategy?
What triggered the current project?
What is the scope of the project?
What has been done before? Any failure? Any success?
Who do we target? Why?
What are your expectations?
Any quantitative / qualitative data available?
Etc. ..
2. Research
To encourage team members to communicate and share their understanding, ideas and visions around the project, I monitored a brainstorming workshop around:
Business Requirements (What? Why?)
Functional Requirements (How?)
This exercise invited everyone to think about the product as a concept, to look at the big picture and therefore avoid rushing to solutions or falling straight into details.
Following Jake Knapp’s best practices, I monitored a Sprint workshop with 8 participants.
Considering the complexity of the industry, we realised that quite a lot of questions deserved to be answered before we could confirm a potential flow, this is how we kept the prototyping and testing phase for a later stage, working as far as we could by making hypothesis.
3. Analysis
Once the workshop was over, I made sure to document every single flow, idea and design that has been explored by the team.
I then reviewed and documented the flow diagram which has been discussed, highlighting questions which bubbled up through the workshop.
4. Design
With the support of the stakeholders, we iterated multiple times on the flow diagram, treating it as a priority to the project.
I used draw.io to build the flow.
Once we confirmed the flow, I then wire-framed the following elements within the product:
- the Home page (new joiner and existing user)
- a Wizard (Step by step process)
- a Shopping experience (a full shopping gallery and a basket)
I used Sketch.
After iterating multiple times on the UX, I then liaised with a UI Designer.
Together we put together a prototype to be tested, using Invision.
Back to Research & Analysis - Time for usability testing!
Research
a) Preparing Usability Testing script, interview questions and tasks.
Following best practices by Steve Krug:
- Intro
- Tasks
- Debrief
b) A Product Designer and I monitored 6 remote usability testing sessions.
Analysis
c) I transcribed the findings into Excel in order to easily identify patterns and compare the findings.
5. Delivery
I built and presented a Usability Testing report:
- About the Usability Test - How did we learn from users?
- Findings - What did we learn?
- Recommendations - What do we recommend?
Considering the insights from the report as well as the business requirements, I iterated on the design to confirm it with the stakeholders.
