AAPC utilized a legacy WinForms application called Phoenix 1.0 (PHX) along with Salesforce to perform sales, customer service and all general membership management tasks.
This Phoenix application was pieced together in 2008 and lacked fundamental Information Architecture / UX optimization, and structure. In addition, they had no general documentation for the Phoenix product or the processes behind how it worked across every department.
There was no Salesforce integration which, consequently, caused sales representatives to toggle between applications. It was because of these inefficiencies they wanted to improve processes by creating a new Phoenix 2.0 IA / UX / UI.
Statement Of Work:
My work on this project included:
1. Discovery and documentation. Capturing the current use state as well as recommending future desired MVP functionality and integration between Phoenix and Salesforce.
• Identifying critical functionality that needed to be maintained, new functionality for the redesign, and summaries of necessary business intelligence processes.
• Providing a new UX / UI template and high fidelity mockups for the Phoenix 2.0 application.
Discovery and Documentation:
User Personas: This spreadsheet above mapped all AAPC departments and their respective processes. This exercise helped me to visually prioritize the key Phoenix 1.0 feature overlaps and user densities. Twenty-four departments and twenty-four processes. Yellow indicates the two departments, Sales and Customer Service, where the most features were used. The red column indicates the most used PHX 1.0 process by the most users. (Names blurred to protect privacy).
Information Architecture: Another UX research study identified all the various items organized within menu structures [main menu / submenu / drop down menus], multi-user categories and authorizations, product color codes, credential and proficiency states, and other mouse states [double click / right click actions].
Contextual Inquiries, Ethnographic Research, Field studies, and Analysis: Below is an example of a summary comprised from PHX 1.0 current state user contextual inquiries, observations, and pattern analysis. This helped the product management and development teams understand areas of revenue loss, and inefficiencies that required optimization. These improvements would prove in helping AAPC generate more revenue from their ability to provide more regional and international conference events to more registrants in less time.
Result: The research data and analysis proved vital in identifying areas of optimization for the redesign.
The next step was to move to low and high fidelity wireframes, however, this step in the project got put on hold due to budget and personnel constraints influenced by the Covid-19 world-wide pandemic through the rest of 2020.