Problem
A death-care provider wanted to revolutionize their industry by providing their sales counselors with an iPad app that helped them keep track of sales, monitor inventory, and communicate with each other, plus an external facing website for potential clients.
Solution
I flew out to Washington state, and during onsite visits and interviews with counselors, I learned first-hand how antiquated the sales process was. Associates were using post-it notes and hand written ledgers to keep track of sales, and the sales leaderboard was a white board in a conference room.
I worked with the product owner and the lead developers to articulate the problem statement:
"We believe that digitzing sales and merchandise is essential for the sales team to be effective. This will achieve a higher level of user engagement. We will have demonstrated this when we can measure an improvement of the current engagement rate by 50% or more."
We worked through assumptions, including a list of user types.
In order to keep focus on our designs, I created an app flow, both to present to stakeholders but also to keep us on target.
From there, I iterated on wires with the product owner and developer until we had something we felt was ready to test.
Tests were simple, guerrilla-style sessions that revealed lots of potential changes for us, though none of them too dramatic. After another round of wires we felt it was time to create final UI.
One more round of testing, and we felt ready to bring the app to life. The final result was so successful in getting the sales team engaged, it quickly was adopted at facilities around the country, greatly increasing the effectiveness of the sales teams nationwide.