ADT - System Test
While at ADT, I was mainly responsible for designing the best user experience for two different products. One was a customer facing web portal called MyADT, and the other was a software tool used by our call centers.
Projects could be small, incremental updates to these tools, or they could be large scale upgrades to incorporate completely new features.
Presented here is a project that incorporated new features that allowed call center agents to place a customer's systems "On Test". The requirements focused on an agent's need to view and select all the various zones in a customer's system and place any of those zones "on test".
My main goal was to simplify the flow thereby reducing the time required to perform this task.
Research and Analyze
A legacy software was being used at the time and researching this tool was the starting point for the design process. What I found was that there were several unused data entry points and complicated flows that made for a convoluted experience.
As part of my research, I organized several contextual interview sessions with both newer call center agents as well as a few senior level agents. The feedback from these agents helped me to understand the mental models they were forming about the system organization and the process as a whole.
Ideate and Sketch
After researching and anaylyzing the current process, I began by sketching out ideas both on paper and whiteboard. I always find that whiteboarding allows for great discussion/feedback from others on the design team.
Design
Once I found that I had a good direction for the design, I began to take my ideas into a digital format using Axure.
Iterate
On this project I went through several iterations with each iteration improving on the last based on feedback from the design team critiques as well as testing with agents.
In this way the design evolved in a natural way. I always try to solicit feedback from both users as well as my design team when possible.
Finalize
The new design reduced the number of clicks required to start a full system test down to two. The final design also solved a problem that no one knew existed before I began: there was a disconnect between the organization of the data and its display.
The new design identified an organizational hierarchy between the services and the zones that when leveraged allowed for easy filtering of all zones.
In the image to the right, you can see a long list of zones in the legacy system requiring agents to scroll line by line. With the new design, agents could quickly winnow the list down to the zones within a specific service. This was perhaps the biggest UX win of this project.
Overview
This project is a very good example of my work at ADT, and it illustrates the process I typically followed.
While at ADT, I oversaw the IA and UX of this agent tool as it evolved from a single page informational site to a robust application with a more complex organization utilizing multiple pages and dozens of new features.
