Establishing the Importance of the End-to-End Experience
Heading into the 2012 tax season, the Tax Import team had an opportunity to radically improve the product experience after proving out the concept and attaining additional engineering resources. The product experience was "inherited" from a previous solution and did not have an optimal experience. The team wanted to prioritize product improvements based on the existing flow, but I took the opportunity to influence them to think about the entire end-to-end experience. I didn't want to just improve the current functionality, but identify new approaches that deliver delight at all points of our customer's workflow and where customers engage us (marketing and support included). I decided an effective way to capture this end-to-end flow was creating information architecture of the desired experience.
The information architecture document was built in a manner that yielded testable "chunks" of the experience on a single 17"x11" page, and the entire experience can be hung across a large wall for easy reference (note the visual breadcrumbs on the upper right that support this). Below are sample pages of the end-to-end flow I created (and refined with) the team that served as our foundation of all the work and improvements we took on, tested with customers and iterated upon.
High-level view of the end-to-end experience. Perfect for senior leaders everywhere to digest.
High-level from/to that visually showed proposed improvements in the experience (i.e. reduction of total steps, new features, etc.)
Detailing the proposed experience
Detailing the proposed experience
Example UI
Low fidelity mockups used to test with customers and collaborate with engineering partners.
Influencing Stakeholders by Articulating the Importance of Solving the Customer Problem Correctly
From an experience perspective, the team zeroed into a solution to review and correct incorrectly imported data. I wanted to make sure we did not simply help our customers overcome that pain, but wanted to find ways to PREVENT accuracy issues altogether. The team felt one "feature" was the best we could do with the time we had, and I challenged the team to think beyond identifying individual pieces of work to think about fixing a customer problem across the end-to-end experience.
I put together this deck and walked our team and decision makers through to illustrate the importance of the changes needed. After taking this time to articulate the design rationale, and what we would lose if we didn't do it, the team was on board and committed the necessary resources to deliver all the changes I requested.
My product team leaders thanked me for taking the time to influence the business to commit to this in order to deliver the best experience possible, and in service to the product's core success metrics.
