Design an awesome experience! Part three.

Chunk it up!

Designing complex services requires that you fill in all the blanks in the service journey. Dividing the your design into a preface, main face and post face helps you focus on what happens before, during and after the user have interacted with the service.

The preface is where the user encounters your service for the first time. You need to ask questions like; how will the user become aware of the service? What parts of the service does the user interface with and how are they presented? Does the service solve the right problems? What is the impression the user is left with after leaving the service and how likely is it that the user will return?

Let us assume that we have interviewed our stakeholders. Sally from accounting have a need for registering correct hours before billing the company’s clients. Her need is to get the system implemented as soon as possible and getting the users to hand in their hours using the new system instead of handing it in on paper once a week, as this is optional.

This means that we need to think about how to make the employees aware of the service, make sure that the service is easy to use and collect the right data so that both the employees and accounting will be satisfied. We want access to the service to be as easy as possible so a maximum two-click link from the welcome page is set as a requirement. We want the user to be able to go straight in and register hours. Integrating the login with the intranet login is one way of achieving this.

When the user have completed registering hours, there should be no further follow-up required from the employee. Returning to the site should also be a simple navigation click or swipe.

Now, this is where the system starts working with the data. The employee data must be reported to accounting so that they can pay the employee salary. In addition to the hours, accounting need to categorize the hours and assign them different properties. In addition, there should be an approval feature letting management reject or approve the hours registered and the explanation given to back them up. Usually the hour registering is part of a third party application. It is likely that the registering form is integrated with the accounting application. In addition, this part might require an integration. For instance, we might need an integration between the intranet and the accounting system, alerting management that there are hours that need approving.