Realizing a Better Call Experience
After 9 months of planning, research, and strategy work, a design direction for a new reservation application was established, and Matter commenced with a 10-month phase to accomplish detailed design for the new user interface. The design including organizational change management support and business case development, future state activity and application site map diagramming, use case specification and process flow development, wireframe development and documentation, content mapping, navigation model and nomenclature design, and design user testing.
What ended up being a deliverable document of 140+ pages of detailed wireframe drawings, started with the creation of a core set of activity diagrams and and initial application site map. The team then moved into use case diagramming and flowcharting. These documents are key deliverables for the requirements management framework and represented an intense and long design effort that, in essence, are lots of words on paper. Very important words that ultimately describe how the application is going to function and flow according to user actions and expectations. We then started the process of content mapping, or accounting for the move and placement of all existing and new content within the new application.
Program scope management discussions were a constant factor during the design process and were greatly facilitated by the creation and iteration of these design documents. Matter helped manage the process of simultaneously creating new features and functions, trimming unused functions, and redesigning existing functions, in parallel with business case justification efforts.
Once a complete set of use cases was created, the team shifted its effort to the creation of wireframes, navigation models, and site nomenclature. This was another intensive effort, and at the midpoint in the months-long process, with the key flows and pages created, the team tested the design directions, process flows, and general page functions with reservation agents at another call center. The tests were greatly successful, confirming the design directions as being right on target, and also yielded numerous enhancements we incorporated into the next round of iterations.
With the end in sight, the team continued to review, iterate, and complete all wireframes. The review process involved executive team members, IT architectural teams, call center management, and business analysts. Once delivery of the wireframes was complete, ending 19 months of extraordinary effort, a side-by-side assessment of the new user interface designs versus the existing user interface was performed. Based on click reduction and accompanying time/effort savings, the new designs were estimated to provide a sustained return on investment well into the tens of millions of dollars.
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