OnDemand was definitely one of the most rewarding projects I’ve had the opportunity to form a part of.
Beetrack wanted to develop a new product centered on on-demand deliveries. The founders believed this could be a great business opportunity, but were nervous because of previous failed products and the large investment of time and resources.
As a product team, we thought over-relying on the opinions of stakeholders and the lack of appropriate research could be the reason behind these failures.
The team was small. During the research and design phases it was composed of the Product Owner, a UX Designer and myself. I had a mixed role between UX-UI and the three of us participated equally in the discovery and research.
When the project was given the green light to start production, the team saw it as an opportunity to evangelize the company and prove that the correct way of developing a product was by using a UX Design Process.
The first thing we needed to do was a comprehensive research to correctly define the problem and find possible solutions. We knew that if we involved various members of the company at an early stage, they would feel part of the project and we would have a better vision of the problem to be solved. We spoke to a variety of stakeholders, C level executives, Country Managers, Account partners, Project Owners, Software technical leads and many other members of the company.
That gave us the inside information that we needed, but to fully understand the problem and the market opportunities we needed information directly from our users. We took advantage of the large customer base of Beetrack and we began interviews with potential clients from a variety of businesses. We did market research to determine segmentation and competitive research to understand how others solve similar problems and identify opportunities.
Once we were sure that we understood the problem, we could properly define the project’s scope, plan, deliverables, and delivery dates. The next steps were to determine our User personas and make the User flows. We made our first field visit, which was immensely clarifying, so we could have all the information to begin wireframing and the creation of low-fidelity prototypes for testing.
I led the project in regards to the hands-on design work and the look and feel. The goal in that sense was to create an interface that looked modern, considering previous Beetrack products were old and outdated in their designs… and obviously to make it easy and enjoyable to navigate from the user’s perspective.
It was also very important to ensure consistency across all aspects of the product, as well as across different Beetrack products that we were re-designing.
After all of this, the process was basically testing and iteration. We did a total of three field visits to one of our biggest customers that had an on-demand service. In each visit we tested our prototypes and gathered insights to later iterate on the designs. After the third visit we were comfortable with the product and finally reached the Handoff stage.
The reception from the whole company was great and this validated us immensely as a product team and specifically as a UX team. This was very important for us and impactful in the company as a whole because it opened the opportunity to form a new DesignOps area.