Portfolio: Interactive & Transactional Systems

S1

During my 7+ year tenure at S1 Corporation (provider of technology solutions for the financial industry), starting out as Manager of an 8-person User Interface Design & Usability Group, and culminating as Global Director of Customer Insights, UX and UI Design Standards, I had the chance to perform many duties, hands-on as well as managerial.

A summary of my work is as follows:

• Responsible for the TOTAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE for a wide range of financial technology products and Official “Evangelist” for company-wide User-Centered Design, including company-wide User Interaction Standards (i.e. Style Guides)
• Organized collaboration of diverse UI design & development teams in locations around the world (Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Los Angeles, Boston, Ireland, U.K. and India)
• Oversight of Use Case development by Business Analysts, Functional Requirements and Marketing Requirements Documents (MRDs) by Product Managers
• Formalized Consumer Research, including ethnography and field interviewing, in the Product Development Process, VERY IMPORTANT in an Engineering-Centric Company like S1.
• Introduction and standardization of a number of new/better customer research methods, including online card-sorting, ethnographic methods, online testing, true quantitative (i.e. beyond pie charts) analysis of surveys.
• Introduced a User Experience Pattern-Based approach to product development. This became very effective way to distill years of usability testing, ethnography and other research (such as terminology, pricing studies, etc.) findings into a specific, actionable form that could drive design of a large and diverse product catalog.
• Established visual attractiveness and emotional appeal as quality criteria

It took many years, surviving countless reorganizations and organizational turmoil to eventually establish the power and influence to make all of the above happen. A lot of products that provided less than an excellent User Experience were produced by essentially renegade engineering groups along the way, but I am proud of several of the product lines that my team and I were able to affect, thanks largely to the Engineering Project Managers who "got it" and cooperated.

Probably my biggest accomplishment was getting User-Centered Design and UX oversight incorporated into S1's official product development process, a version of RUP (Rational Unified Process), which was formalized pretty late in the game.

S1 Enterprise Solutions with Examples

What is now called S1 Enterprise, and to a lesser extent, what is now called Full-Service Banking Solutions (FSB) is where my team, my colleagues and I really made some good stuff happen (i.e. products that provide User Experiences ranging from pretty good to excellent). We performed all of the following activities in support of improving design and development:

• Hundreds of hours of Usability Evaluation, ranging from Expert Reviews to full-blown formal Usability Tests, conducted at customer locations (often Bank branches and Call Centers), as well as in fixed location Usability Labs (in Atlanta and Bloomington, IL).
• Observational studies (ranging from short "Ethnography lite" to true Ethnographic studies lasting weeks) of the days-in-the-lives of:
  • Head Tellers
  • Bank Tellers ("at the counter")
  • Bankers (the people who have desks and sometimes offices)
  • Bank Call Center Managers
  • Call Center Staff
  • Large numbers of "regular people" who use online banking services
  • Users of online insurance rate quote systems
• Card-Sorting studies to determine optimal naming of online commands and their categorization (to help with navigation design)
• Product Satisfaction surveys (and statistically analysis, of course) of current customers
• Depth-Interviews and Structured Interviews of a sub-set of survey respondents
• Visual Preference and Appeal Questionnaires (to help with refreshing the visual aspects of all systems, some quite out-of-date...e.g. written for Netscape 3.0)
• Distillation of all of the above into Actionable Insights that could drive design and development

• Creation, "Socialization" and dissemination of Design Patterns

Some Background on the Resulting Product Lines (Note: S1, like many software companies, is not really keen on showing demos...but not to worry, I have demos of actual implementations to show in other postings). Click on the links below.

• S1 Enterprise Platform
• S1 Enterprise Personal Banking
  
  • Personal Banking Guided Tour
• S1 Enterprise Business Banking
• S1 Enterprise Corporate Banking
• S1 Enterprise Branch Solutions
  
  • Case Study M&T Bank's Success with S1 Enterprise Branch Solutions 
• S1 Enterprise Teller
• S1 Enterprise Sales and Service System
• S1 Enterprise Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Call Center System
• S1 Enterprise Insurance Applications

Walmart.com

When I was engaged as a "Consulting Cognitive Engineer" by NCR, an important client, Walmart, which was just considering getting serious about its online store, challenged NCR to do a study of the existing version of Walmart.com and then WOW them with at least one actionable insight, with two VERY important caveats attached.

1. Our insight had to be believable (we had to offer support that it was a "true" insight)
2. Walmart had not thought of it already (they promised to be honest)

Given my expertise in doing the kinds of research that elicit hidden insights, such as ethnography and depth interviewing, I was brought onto the project and given the task to WOW Walmart management, who are not easily impressed with anything, as far as I could tell.

I set up a study that combined on-site (in peoples' homes and/or offices) usability testing with pretty much by-the-book Contextual Inquiry, as laid by Dr. Karen Holzblatt in her book of the same title. I had recently attended a post-Doctoral seminar with Dr. Holzblatt and knew the method well (pretty much what we call 'Ethnography Lite' these days).

To make a long story short, we met with a "cast of thousands" at Walmart, on their turf in Bentonville, AK, armed with 50 or so really serious problems with the existing Walmart.com. In my presentation, I was stopped at about the 20th actionable insight. Initially thinking that I had said something that offended someone (the cut-off was very sudden), what had actually happened was that I had already revealed 4 or 5 issues that had not even appeared as blips on Walmart's in-house research group's, product development's or management's "radar screens". The Director of Development declared that no consultant had ever come up with such useful information before and certainly not a Ph.D. type (a pretty close paraphrase of his comment). I took it as a compliment.

Result: NCR got all sorts of add-on work (things I am sure that I am not even aware of), riding the cloud of "cred" that I had helped to build. It did not hurt in developing my own internal credibility withing NCR either. One of the more satisfying moments of my professional life!

Take a look at Walmart.com as it exists today. Of course it has evolved substantially since my involvement.

HMV

HMV stands for "his master's voice". It was originally the U.K. division of RCA Victor, but is now a separate company (I am pretty sure). At any rate, HMV is one of the largest media outlets in the world. While consulting with iXL on Information Architecture, usability matters, and user experience in general, I was called upon by the Senior Management of the Engineering Division of iXL, who "owned" the contract with this very high profile customer, to do a detailed Information Architecture for a refresh of the existing www.HMV.com.

Using known web usability guidelines of the time and knowledge from prior work in the area of eCommerce, I created a detailed Information Architecture in a manner that departed from current practice at iXL, using Visio to create a real software workflow. This was important, as all of the involved parties, at iXL and with HMV, were Engineers, who understood workflow diagrams.

Bottom Line: My client (iXL) and their client (HMV) were delighted with the results. I recently reviewed HMV.com and it is apparent that the extensibility that I built into the Information Architecture has stood the test of time...while HMV's product line has expanded greatly, the workflows I created are essentially intact in the existing system.

I was engaged to re-design iXL's own Intranet based on the reputation for excellence I earned.

Postscript: Largely based on the HMV Information Architecture, my work on the iXL Intranet and some Contextual Inquiry that I performed for another large client, I was offered the first Directorship of the yet-to-be-formed UX/Usability practice at iXL. I received the offer two hours after I had already accepted an offer to manage the UI group at S1 Corporation; therefore I went to work at S1 as business ethics demand.

Trustmark Bank

Trustmark is known throughout the Southern states. Its headquarters are in Jackson, MS. While at S1, my staff members and I were given exceptional access to the bank's Customer Support Center to conduct numerous Depth Interviews and Observation.

Many Trustmark staff members were given time away from their jobs for lengthy interviews and to participate in formal usability testing of various S1 products (mostly Customer Support oriented), which were in various stages of development, ranging from html prototypes to almost fully functional systems.

Trustmark's online demo of its now live Bill Payment system, which is part of its S1 Online Banking (product geared towards Trustmark's customers), shows clearly how many iterations of usability testing and related customer research really pays off. It is noteworthy that the Vice President who was one of the major contacts with S1 was a VERY big fan of usability testing. He was also a big fan of using multiple Usability Testing vendors (in addition to my team) and distilling the results into a solid set of insights to drive design.