In his article, Jared Spool shows the importance of team members and stakeholders being aware of the current user experience.

I thought to myself, "Yeah that makes total sense, I wonder how we would do that in our org if we ever came across a similar situation"

I thought too soon.

Identifying the UX issues

A couple of us designers were helping an IT team improve an application they built which generated underwriting documents. The underwriters felt it was too cumbersome and that the tasks took much longer in the new application than they did using their manual excel files.

We found several issues as we worked with users to understand their painpoints. We brought insights to the IT team, excited to help create a better product.

The document generation page (among other things)

Specifically, one of the most ridiculous things in the application was generating the document (the main point of this app). You first were taken to a screen (sorry, can't share it here) that had several buttons that weren't relevant to someone wanting to generate a document. Then, if you could figure which button to click, you had to select which file format you wanted. But unbeknownst to you, if you select the "wrong" file type, you can't edit some legal language that you need to edit. And, there's a template for the document that you need to select, but it didn't look like you could select it.

After all that, you had to choose whether to "Generate" or "Submit" the document 🤨. Generate will give you your document, but Submit will also give you your document, but not open it and show it in your list of documents which is on another page there is no easy way to get to. Underwriters thought it meant submit for approval.

This tool was quite literally slowing down the company from making money.

The software package

As we showed the IT team these issues, they looked into the software package used to build the tool and said "Oh this isn't customizable in the software package so we can't even change the text on the buttons", or "This will impact the way we process the data", etc. The IT team were nice folks, it just felt like this packaged one size fits all software was gettign in the way of a better experience for underwriters.

A failed usability test?

As we prepared for the usability test on what little we could change, we realized users would probably fail most tasks.

Deciding to invite the team to observe

We also realized we could use this anticipated failure to our advantage, to help prove that the user experience wasn't great and something needed to give. We extended invitations to the team, IT folks and a couple of key stakeholders.

The usability test

Most of the team attended the test. Users really struggled with the key tasks that we needed to test - including the document generation page mentioned earlier. It was clear no one could get through it unless you were told how it worked, and even then it would be inefficient.

The IT team could now fix it!

Soon after this usability test, the IT team told us they could indeed change the document generation page. In fact, they would rebuild it from scratch instead of using the software package!

The next usability test

Shortly after they built the new document generation page, we tested it again with some underwriters. They all were able to generate their documents now! The IT team also continued observing subsequent usability tests since they found them insightful, which felt like a pretty big win for us.

The IT team became more interested in the user experience

The IT team became more receptive to tweaking and improving the user experience of the current application and in fact started suggesting their own ideas. The Business Analyst started making his own mockups as a way to communicate his ideas, and the IT Lead started collaborating with us on ensuring technical feasibility of our ideas and proposing alternatives as needed. The product owner was willing to push back deadlines a little bit if it meant features were designed well.

Invite folks to see the user experience for themselves, and they will go out of their way to help you make it better.