Whose app is it?

Sometimes it's not just a redesign.

🧢 Role: Product Designer, Researcher

🧠 Demonstrated Skills: User Research, Information Architecture, Prototyping, Design

⏳ Duration: 6 months

Overview

The Zebra Mobile Field App (MFA) tracks tasks that target cost-saving opportunities. It provides a platform for corporate teams to recommend corrective actions to brick and mortar locations.

My Contributions

I conducted research engagements with existing customers across various personas, created IA maps and wireframes to iterate on, and finally redesigned the application’s core features using Zebra’s (developing) design system. This case study follows just one of those key features.

Business Outcomes

• Defined experiences for a role-based experience that distinguished between mobile and desktop target users.

• Conducted research provided valuable insights to daily responsibilities for associates, store manager, and regional managers that informed initiatives in larger software portfolio.

• Research findings also uncovered overlap between other solutions that Zebra had acquired around the same time - this ultimately led to an integration between the two products.

Finding the real problem

MFA was facing a downward trend in customer retention and user engagement when compared to its desktop counterpart. Zebra prioritized a significant redesign for MFA.

After conducting discovery sessions with customers, I uncovered three main themes across multiple personas:

• Unfocused experience across targeted personas

• Irrelevant data was being exposed on the mobile application

• Complex user journey and extra clicks for end users to execute main objectives

Uncovering areas of opportunity

We summarized our findings into personas which we could then reference to work towards creating a role-based experience.

Personas vary in their areas of responsibility and capacity to make use of the functionality. We uncovered a few areas of opportunity:

• Improve Walks so that it is easier to execute and optimize results for visibility

• Make the data easier to access and understand

• Highlight creation and streamline task management experience

Pointing to role-based security

Another major theme we uncovered in our interviews was how different the various personas used the application.

After capturing business requirements from both Zebra and our customers, I put together an IA map to identify what features were relevant to each persona.

After taking inventory of the map, we pared down the information architecture of the product and focused on delivering solutions per role.

We had a case to go after.

Target Persona: Associate

We first tackled the associate workflow as they were the primary users of the mobile app as managers and corporate users typically gravitated towards the desktop experience.

Associates just want to get their work done.

When conducting usability interviews with associates, we observed that the path to completion was unclear. The users were inundated with reports and charts that seemed irrelevant to their main objective and the information hierarchy of the pages created confusion.

Defining New User Flows

As we tackled the redesign of this project, we knew we needed to reduce excessive workflows for the associate to create a focused task execution experience for them.

One of the primary workflows for the associate is how they move through an opportunity. An opportunity is the task that is pushed to the end user, generated from captured data. The system pushes this task to users coupled with recommended steps (prescriptive actions) to take and outlines a list of problem areas (caught items) that they need to check.

Previously, a user would open an opportunity and have to decide whether or not they wanted to open the caught items or prescriptive actions that day - it did not matter if they opened them or not as it did not prevent them from closing the opportunity.

Of course, businesses create these opportunities in hopes that end users would take the corrective actions. We had a navigational issue here. We needed to restructure the flow such that the prescriptive actions and caught items were children of the opportunity, leading the end user to a proper opportunity resolution.

This helped inform the necessary changes we needed to make.

Designing a Solution

We were able to reduce this workflow from 9 screens to 3 key screens.

The solution

The new workflow now introduced a streamlined approach for associates to work on their assigned opportunities.

• Implemented a progress bar to help users understand where they were in the opportunity workflow while distilling the flow into 3 simple steps

• Moved the analytics views into the summary to promote learning about business metrics

• Improved usability of forms on the summary screen