Cynthia Yeung - Case Study, Streamlining requirement gathering

How might we streamline requirement gathering from Customers and Trading Partners?

Cleo is a software company that provides an integration platform for supply chain companies, including logistic providers, manufacturers, and wholesalers. Customer and Trading Partner onboarding takes up to eight months starting from when the Statement of Work is signed. Apart from unresponsiveness from Trading Partners to collect essential requirements, the process takes longer as multiple tools are used by different people. There is a lack of transparency among the team which takes multiple checkpoints to come to a common understanding and status.

Coordinating with our stakeholder partner, my team and I conducted mixed-methods research to understand:

What are the pain points?
Where do the blockers occur in the process?
What resourcing and allocations are available to us to address our problem statement?
Who are the involved stakeholders and what are their roles in the blockers?

Research Approach

Over a period of six months, my team and I employed the double-diamond research method to structure the project.

Diagram of double-diamond research method used to structure Cleo research project.

Research Methods

In our Discover phase, we focused on the research using contextual inquiry research methods. We gathered data through stakeholder interviews, product walkthroughs, and artifact reviews. Uncovering insights into our problem statement and defining the scope of our focus through creating models such as Sequence Model, Task Flow Model, Service blueprint, and personas.

Once we consolidated our research, we moved quickly into our Develop phase with focus. We conceptualized potential solutions with user scenarios, concept sketches, and rapid prototyping before selecting and user validating our strongest concept.

Affinity Mapping

Contextual Inquiry  
Consolidation Models

Personas

Rapid Prototype

Annotated Wireframes

User Evaluations

Research Outcomes

Our last deliverable was a concept prototype. It was developed for testing to further learn and iterate on the user flows. We concluded the project with user testing to establish the priority of the next steps for the project solution.

Our solution to the problem statement—“How might we streamline requirement gathering for Customers and Trading Partners?” was an all-in-one environment highlighting three user flows: Starting with the onboarding process with a statement of work with a sales representative to the project kickoff with project manager and the implementation of the business requirements with the engineer. We used artifacts collected from our research phase to inform every design decision.

The goal of our solution was to streamline the hand-off of each stakeholder’s responsibilities in the onboarding process and reduce context switching by delivering synchronized updates as needed to the right partners.

7 second gif of Project Manager user flow updating Statement of Work for new Customer onboarding in clickable prototype.

Project Manager user flow updating a Statement of Work for new Customer onboarding.

Project Reflections

Pay attention to what the data is telling you. Sometimes what is wanted by the client isn’t what is needed to address the problem. The data gathered from the research was clear—Without a driving motivation for Trading Partners to migrate processes to the Cleo platform, Customer onboarding would be blocked until Trading Partners cooperated with Cleo.
- With this discovery, our capstone project goals pivoted from product design solutions to service design solutions. Understanding and communicating reasons for onboarding setbacks was the critical process for Cleo stakeholders and their customers. Cleo stakeholders shared common pain points around time-consuming and manual tasks and the back-and-forth telephone communications between teams and external partners.
While rapid prototyping gives space to quickly explore creative solutions, also gives us a new perspective on existing solutions allowing us to evaluate improvements rather than reinventing the wheel. This also allowed us to consider the level of effort and how we might be adding complexities when a first simple MVP iteration of the solution may suffice.
Learning to work with constraints and accepting the limitations—No define phase is truly complete without a critical touchpoint. Without having access to real Customers and Trading Partners, we have a huge gap to understanding our proposed solution’s impact in effectiveness and efficiency to our problem statement.

Appendix

Due to project confidentiality, please note that documents have been amended to exclude private proprietary content and company information. Shared prototypes are high-level concepts demonstrating usability of product designs.

Concept Validation Presentation Deck

A concept prototype was developed for testing to further learn and iterate on the user flows. We created high-fidelity mockup from our annotated wireframes for a presentation deck we used for a stakeholder concept validation meeting.

View Concept Validation Deck

Clickable Prototype

Based on feedback from our concept validation meeting with our stakeholders, the team iterated on our high-fidelity mockups and implemented more screens to our three user flows to illustrate a complete new Trading Partner onboarding task flow.

View Figma Prototype