How does it come together?
Background + my role
TradeWindow provides an aggregator service through Cube, for seamless integration between different stakeholders from Shipping to Retail making this truly a Farm to Plate solution.
I joined the business as the Lead CX/UX Designer. My role was centered around optimising the experience of the of individual products and connecting the product silos for a seamless CX leaving fewer mandates to the users’ workflow.
Problem
The user creates and saves a booking through the bookings app.
The user creates a contract through the contracts app.
The user cannot create an association between a booking and a contract and vice versa and therefore cannot use the extended functionality of Cube.
Requirement gathering
Having worked earlier on some features of these products separately, I had a deep understanding of the possible bridges that could be leveraged to create this association.
However I did not want to put the cart before the horse. It was important we moved away from Lean methodology I use in the Agile Dual Track to deep discovery + problem definition of the Double Diamond process in a Sprint environment.
I began with stating the assumptions + defining the scenario and mapped both journeys in workshops over two consecutive days in the Covid-19 lockdown. This was my opportunity to put to sharpen my remote facilitation skills.
The team included: Customer X2, Product Owner, Senior API Developer, UI Developer X2 and myself.
Through this process we determined 👉🏼
The user would need to surface the Booking Reference Number and Contract Reference Number in order to make the booking-contract connection
Cube’s product promise is to not not set a mandate upon the user and allow them to create this association at any time during the process
Search modals with appropriate lookups and search fields can help interrogate the databases
The engineering team was now aware of the the new APIs that were required to be developed
Ability to feed these values manually was also identified as a requirement in the workshop
I tested multiple flows while considering 👉🏼
error prevention
recognition over recall
locus of control
non standardised inputs - input validation
scenarios from QA + Product Owner
API limits
Scenarios and other technology limitations gathered.
Primary research was always available for reference during the process
Simple task flows from contracts to bookings translated in to the architecture
Simple task flows from bookings to contracts translated in to the architecture
Putting your product in the hands of the user is nerve wracking! Here’s a piece of feedback from the Head of Customer Success at Trade Window that asserts the fact that we have understood our users mental model as we attempt to solve their pain points leveraging their own unconscious competence.