Spearheading the service request platform experience for clients

PROJECT BACKGROUND

I joined the University of Toronto’s Facilities & Services (F&S) team as a Lead Product Designer where I collaborated closely with project managers, developers, process analysts, and QA. I gained insight into the market, clients, and user needs of the product to design an intuitive, easy-to-use service request experience. I owned the end-to-end user journey and all aspects of design execution from research, vision, ideation, prototyping, and user testing, to final production.

Below is a little snippet of the project!
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TEAM MAKEUP

1 Business Improvements & Strategic Initiatives Manager
2 Developers
2 Process Analysts
1 Communications Officer
6 Stakeholders
2 Designers
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ROLE

Lead Product Designer
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RESPONSIBILITIES

User Research, Wireframes,
Prototyping, Visual Design, User Testing, Product Strategy
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TOOLS

Figma, Pen & Paper, Photoshop, Illustrator, Optimal workshop

Project Overview

THE PROBLEM

F&S clients are frustrated with the current service request platform.
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THE SOLUTION

A redesigned service request platform that addresses user needs and achieves business goals.
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BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES/GOALS

Creating a seamless intuitive service request platform for clients to submit service requests, will allow U of T Facilities and Services (U of T F&S) to work towards its strategic goal of providing superior customer solutions through the following:
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01. Improve communication with clients around lost/missing information, and follow ups
02. Help clients submit requests accurately and efficiently
03. Improve service delivery and ensure customer satisfaction
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Context gathering

Joining a new team means there is a boatload of context I do not have so I conducted some preliminary research to build on my understanding of the facilities management space. I also took time to familiarize myself with the different roles of clients and property managers since I’ll be working closely with them.
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But first things first, what is a service request?
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An ask from any member of the university for a facilities-related need.
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What is a facilities-related need?
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This ranges from property management, caretaking, elevators, fire prevention, grounds, hazardous materials, HVAC, mechanical utilities, mail, moving, safety, trades, or waste management and recycling.

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Okay, but what is the service request platform?...‍

DEFINING THE SERVICE REQUEST PLATFORM

The service request platform is a centralized software solution that enables users to submit, view, and manage service requests from the time they are submitted to the time they are closed.

Screenshot of the original service request platform.

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Research Plan

ORGANIZING RESEARCH QUESTIONS

At this point, my fellow designer and I still had a million questions running through our minds therefore, we held a whiteboard workshop to organize our questions as a guiding point for our user research.

Jing and I organizing our research questions

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Unfortunately, as we were just scraping the surface, Jing had to leave the project. Moving forward, I took on the role of the sole lead designer with support from the rest of my team.

RESEARCH GOALS & METHODS

Before diving deep into research, I established our research goals
01. Better understand the needs, preferences, doubts, and attitudes users experience with the service request platform including workarounds.
02. Uncover user pain points with the existing service request platform.
03. Identify themes to understand the service request experience needed to be built.
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SYNTHESIZING OUR RESEARCH

We had an overwhelming amount of notes and observations from users. I led a virtual affinity mapping workshop with my team to place our findings into clustered themes. We analyzed our research and extracted key points based on the following key points and clusters. At the end of the workshop, I brainstormed a few 'How might we?" (HMW) questions from each cluster to use during our brainstorming ideation session with the rest of the team.
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WHO IS OUR USER?

After synthesizing our research I developed our ideal user persona. This allowed us to ensure we understood our user and helped guide us in our ideation process by brainstorming through our target user’s perspective.

Say hello to Victor!

Ideation & Design

BRAINSTORM SESSIONS

Brainstorming potential solutions to HMW questions

To get all our ideas out on the table, I led a few ideation workshops with the rest of our team. While keeping Victor's needs at the forefront, we came up with ideas for each HMW question. We then voted based on each idea based on effort and impact - each team member got 3 votes per 1 HMW question.
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Prioritizing ideas

The ideas with the highest number of votes were then plotted onto a prioritization grid. The grid helped visualize ideas that fell under certain categories such as Home Runs, Big Bets, Quick Wins, and Marginal Gains. We selected ideas that fell under the 'Home Runs' section (highlighted in light blue) as these would have a high impact and were relatively easier to implement.

RESEARCH GOALS & METHODS

Time to test the navigation, groupings, and designs with users. I used my mid-fidelity mockups to create a prototype to conduct moderated user tests. I believe a usability test isn't a validation test but rather, it's a test to find problems with your designs. By observing how users behaved we were able to create a much more functional experience for the intended audience.

01. Test the categorization and labeling of the service request platform to assess the findability of items/features
02. Identify the importance and potential usage of each service request detail within the filter relative to one another
03. Identify the importance and prioritization of certain features over others
04. Test the usability of the medium-fidelity prototype
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KEY ITERATIONS

Final Design

HIGH FIDELITY DESIGNS

After several iterations, design critiques, and cross-functional meetings, I finalized the design to hand off to our developers to ship!

I created a handoff document that included interactions, edge cases, and other notes about the new service request platform.

Main dashboard

Service request tracking + progress updates

Users can track the status of their service requests in real-time. The tracker consists of the latest status and prior updates, displayed in chronological order.

Users can choose to opt in to progress updates if they want to stay informed on any changes to their request.

Next Steps

The new design is set to go live in June 2024. Unfortunately, I had to leave the project before it could get launched. Before I left the F&S team, I synced with another designer to outline measures of success:
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Reflect & Grow

01. Working cross-functionally

It was important to engage with project managers, stakeholders, developers, content writers, and other lead executives through frequent touch points. These interactions clarified business goals, provided insight into the key areas of improvement, and assisted with our copywriting strategy.
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02. Communication is key

One of the most important skills for designers is the ability to communicate design intent. It was essential to be vocal about my work, defend my design choices to others, and habitually share information widely within and beyond my immediate team. This is how I built trust with others and ultimately went from design artifacts to reality.
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