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Impact
‍

Reduced Call Time

2 Minute Reduction

Learn How

5 Unique Groups Discovered

R and Optimal Workshop

See Research

Actionable Insights

UI Overhaul

View Results

User Persona: Anonymized Bank Customer Service Agent

Key Insight

"It normally takes me 15 minutes to navigate from one application to another. It also typically takes me thirty minutes to one hour to look up an entry in the fare rules. During that time, I am on the phone with our customers."
- Senior Escalation Desk Customer Service Agent

Goals

• Resolve customer issues quickly without escalation
• Minimize time spent navigating between applications

Agent Behaviors Insights

• Relies on memorized workflows and shortcuts to avoid UI inadequacies.
• Develops personal “workarounds” for inefficient systems, such as for the inability to search.
• Prioritizes speed

Pain Points

• Manual command entry increases cognitive load
• Excessive amount of time (thirty minutes to one hour) looking up information in fare rules.
• A high business cost was accrued due to the number of agents delayed by insufficient Fare Rules design.

Agent Needs

• Clear, structured navigation
• Reduced reliance on memory for fare rules
• Immediate feedback on actions

Methods and Process
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My research process flowchart shows what I did two months before the study. It also includes a day-by-day breakdown during the study.

• Method:
  
• I talked to stakeholders to decide which cards participants would sort. Fare Rules is a complex feature. I also confirmed a research plan before starting the research.
• The customer service manager scheduled agents with me. I used Optimal Workshop to gather data.
• I clustered to see how participants grouped cards. This helped identify pages and sections for the new UI.

• Schedule:
• This was Tallwave and the client's first card sort, so I provided two months for education which occurred during group and 1-on-1 client meetings.
• Other methods, like usability tests, can be done faster.
• This approach ensured thorough data collection and analysis. I finished data gathering and presentation creation in 10 days.
  
• I shared the findings with the client and the UX design team. We discussed them over the following months.

Further Analysis in R
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• The client needed clearer proof to approve big interface changes. These changes would affect thousands of agents.
• The design team asked for specific guidance on which elements to group. They also wanted to know which ones had flexibility.
• We needed to look at the statistics to check if the patterns were real mental models and were not random.
• Optimal Workshop couldn't show how strong the agreement was between cards and groups. This made it hard to rank the most important groupings.

• The team and I would use the groups to decide what goes on each page. The text in each group provides the relevant information for that page.
• I identified five distinct categories of information through dendrogram visualization. This supports five pages, not four like the Optimal Workshop analysis suggested.
  
• The dendrogram displayed groups but didn't measure user agreement on cards within each group.
• From the dendrogram alone, I could not determine how necessary it was for some specific information to be on a page or page section.