Research synthesis and concepting @ frog

frog is a global design consultancy that works with companies in a wide variety of sectors. Their rallying cry is “form follows emotion”, but the work now extends beyond physical forms and into brand systems, digital products, and services.

One of the clients I worked with was a telecommunications corporation. We were tasked to design a Portal that would satisfy their internal needs and provide a seamless experience for their clients. The project had just kicked off with the client, but other offices had already done the research. We continued with research validation, synthesis, and product concepting.

THE VISION

A portal that provides an efficient and intuitive interface for clients and staff to remotely provision, configure, and maintain networks.

The portal should address the needs of internal stakeholders during the provision, configuration, and maintenance process of setting up a wide area network, while still providing a world class customer experience to the customers who will be using it.

THE SUCCESS CRITERIA

An extensible platform

The platform is designed and engineered for extensibility. The design patterns and engineering systems are in place that enable growth. It is affordable and fast to add new functionality and services to the platform allowing access to features as soon as they are available.

A world class customer facing portal

The primary win is the interface provided to the customer. Customer’s lives are made easier. The Portal is a showcase for the FlexWare product resulting in more sales and more satisfied customers.

Reduced time to provision, update, and troubleshoot

Tooling, workflows and visualizations reduce the time and effort needed to: stand up new sites, gather the necessary information, stage the data for Test and Turn Up, react to customer change requests and troubleshoot network issues.

THE PROCESS

Understand the user journey for different personas and the specific tools they use

Our team built on the previous research by following up with more in-depth interviews. We took the quotes from the interviews and organized them into relevant groups, topics, insights, opportunities, and principles. All of this had to map to a point in the user journey.

Abstract the user journey to convey the vision

We took our research and abstracted each step in the flow into color blocks. We discovered that using this visual approach was a more efficient way to communicate how and where we wanted to simplify provisioning. Stakeholders really didn’t need to read into the tiny details of each tool to understand the current problem and where it lies in the process.

Formulate use cases for wireframes

This step was a big challenge. It was difficult to find the right starting point for the wireframes because the information we had on each persona was gathered from different people, from different parts of the process. Additionally, the nature of this problem was highly technical. Few of us had a complete understanding of how uPCE dependent wide area networks worked.

To combat this confusion, I dug in deeper into the user interviews and worked closely with the Analysts and Solution Engineers on the team. Our collaboration was integral to the design of the wireframes.

Passed the baton

My internship with frog ended in the middle of the project, so I wasn’t able to see it through to the end. However, I gained invaluable experience from this project and team. I thoroughly enjoyed designing in a technical problem space, which eventually led me to my interest in working at data.world.