My process

To give my process some context, I will walk through a project I was involved in while at MyWave.

 

Client

Energy Australia

 

Project background

This project was part of the EA (Energy Australia) incubator program with a time-line of 12 weeks.

 

The objective: A prioritised roadmap and recommendation for a VA (virtual assistant) experience based on the value to Energy Australia (cost v benefit) - thus enable a volume shift from chat teams and call centres to VA conversations.

 

Key people involved

EA (Energy Australia): Product owner, scrum master, BA

MyWave: UX/UI and conversation design lead, tech lead, QA

Litmus: HCD & CX specialist

 

We worked within an Agile Scrum framework, with a high expectation on delivery and also knowledge & skill sharing.

 

* My involvement in this project was the UX/UI and conversation design lead.

 

 

The process

 

Stage 1

After working through the hypothesis statement, defining our objectives and problem statement, we conducted our initial round of research.

 

This consisted of:

• analysing existing data and analytics
• investigating any existing VA experiences in market
• looking at current EA processes and work flows

to create an initial VA user flow and prototype which was used as part of the 1 on 1 customer interviews.

 

I also spent time at the chat centre to look at how the EA representatives dealt with the various customer enquiries including complaints. I did this to get a better understanding of tone and language used in resolving customer problems which also reflected the EA brand.

 

I lead an ideation session with the team where we reviewed existing data and current processes to determine which of the short-listed user journeys would be best suited to transform into a VA experience in order to test and validate the hypotheses. Once the user journey was agreed upon I then built the wireframe and prototype (including the design of the conversation) which took the user on a single path. The prototype was built using my own pre-built UI kit.

 

 

 

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Bill extension wireframe + prototype

 

Once the script was completed (including all the above artefacts) we conducted 1 on 1 interviews with candidates as a team (with the HCD researcher facilitating the interviews).

 

Using the insights from the research three personas were created. They were used to determine our audience segment.

 

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The research also yielded valuable feedback on the VA experience.

 

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As a team we presented our findings to the business as an end of sprint showcase. I presented the wireframes and prototype with the respective feedback.

 

Stage 2

Interviews were conducted - a card sort and questionnaire to identify which were the highest value non financial transactions that customers would complete using a VA. We also wanted to gain more insights into how the customers wanted to interact with a virtual assistant ie. VA storing personal information (credit card details), VA being proactive with reminders or initiating conversations and any concerns or fears. As part of this research I built two basic flows to demonstrate to the participants, what a proactive and reactive VA experience could be.

 

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Proactive and reactive

journey examples

 

Many of the users felt that seeing a 'live' conversation would give them better context in understanding a conversational experience. Taking this feedback I mapped out a more complex journey that had multiple paths, then worked with the MyWave tech lead (and team) to create a live software prototype. We used MyWave pre-built tooling to quickly do this.

 

 

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Bill payment and bill payment in instalments wireframe + prototype + 'live' prototypes

 

 

Final Stage

We also wanted to test how long people would persist with a VA who couldn't help them before requesting a customer representative. I wrote a script, created a slack channel and tested 8 participants.

 

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I mapped out the final journey, which the team (including business owner and business sponsor) had identified as highest value to the business. This was then tested with users to validate the journey and solution.

 

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Concessions wireframe + live prototype

 

At this stage all the research synthesis was being used in creating a prioritized road map and recommendation for a VA experience based on understanding the cost benefit value to EA. As part of this, MyWave's tech lead and I provided two documents which outlined the considerations for a multi-lingual VA experience and technical recommendations for the above.

 

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Technical recommendation + Multi-lingual considerations documents

 

PROJECT END