Leafhome: Solving for Convoluted Processes.
My Role
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User Research, User Interviews, Journey Mapping, User Personas, Task Flows, Wireframing.
Client
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For all things home and from start to finish, we deliver fast, seamless, transformative solutions – directly to you. We’ve got your back. And we’re proud to call you neighbor.
— Live Comfortable. Live Safe. Live Happy.
Year
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Project ran for 4 weeks over the course of 2 sprints before beginning the implementation phase.
Problem Space.
Leafhome has 4 verticals through which they offer services to clients. This requires frequent reporting internally in order to track business metrics & track leads for potential client acquisition. Leafhome employs a myriad of platforms to create data tables and reports to move through their workflow, which often results in discrepancies in data & executives receiving reports with outdated or jumbled information.
Project Overview: What steps do we need to take?
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Research
Conduct user-interviews to understand business requirements, project constraints and overall current business processes & flows.
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Define
Profile our end-user from a human-centred perspective to uncover their pain-points, motivations & behaviours as they traverse their work-flow.
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Identify
Narrow down on three specific use-cases to be used as reference for solutioning task flows and collaborating with implementation team (architects).
Primary Research: User-Interviews
“The guessing game can be tough sometimes when trying to find specific data.”
— Stakeholder & User
“We need to be able to look at things month over month, data sets get out of hand very quickly.”
— Stakeholder & User
“Managing tables is annoying because everything breaks when you touch it.”
— Stakeholder & User
“We don’t have a way to show the true source of something.”
— Stakeholder & User
Synthesizing the information gathered from user-interviews, I was able to create three key themes/ buckets under which users were experiencing shared/ overlapping pain-points & stress.
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Consistency
Data is being pulled from multiple sources and joined together into different databases & tables, causing the discrepancies in information and misalignments in reporting.
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Efficiency
Lots of manual intervention is required for processes such as exporting data and/or using excel sheets, which can eat up time & resources. Joining of tables is an unenjoyable task as it can set off a chain of inconsistent data points.
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Agility
Time is wasted on having to do manual refreshes of data sets & sources at the start of a report cycle. This can impact productivity, and overall block certain tasks within the process flow.
Defining the User.
To better illustrate our user’s journey, I built an experience map that covers the scope of what generating a report might look like at Leafhome. We can follow the touch-points along the path of work and identify what actions our Persona is taking at any given moment, what he might be experiencing, and even suggest what could be happening instead. The goal here is to look at how and where we might provide an experience for someone like David, that is enjoyable, easy to use & effectively reduces the stresses and annoyances of working with overly convoluted systems.
Visualizing the Context & Identifying Use-Cases.
A context Diagram was then created to align the client, architects on my team and stakeholders on where the users might be experiencing the problem within the business flow , narrowing down the source of the issue and identifying it visually. We then collaboratively decided on three use-cases to focus on with the client based on findings.
Coming to Life.
Using all gathered information, I created sketches and developed them into a high fidelity wireframe. This is meant to offer ideas around solutions to navigate the problem space effectively.
Next Steps.
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Present it.
I presented the findings to the client in the form of a case-study & presentation, going through the problem space and discussing the use-cases in a collaborative environment.
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Review it.
I reviewed the findings with my team of architects and dev experts, brainstorming ideas around implementation.
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Pitch it.
After it was decided that a Data Warehouse platform would be the best solution for Leafhome, the architects developed an architecture diagram demonstrating how employing Snowflake would help address these problems based on my design.
