Research and design of PM Compliance Interface
Welcome to the research and design of “PM Compliance Interface”. Discover how we helped PM tool with user experience and strengthen its compliance management platform.
Background
PM tool is a legacy application with good quality features however did not have industry standard user experience. In this project, we are trying to give a new face to the PM tool with PM Interface.
On a broader level, it’s a web application with the ability to raise compliance, raise project reports, and submit and track orders. On a granular level, this involves many actors in order to achieve compliance with all projects.
For the purpose of this case study, I will elaborate on one of the most important features of the interface, which is Compliance.
Users/Actors who can access the compliance portal are: All active users, below are roles who have an action assigned in the portal: Product manager, project manager, delivery manager, technical manager, and compliance SPOC.
Few things to know about Compliance:
1. Every project will have to be compliant to match the defined standards.
2. One compliance mostly will have multiple checks, for which a compliance response has to be provided to inform if it is ok or not.
3. For every response, proof has to be provided.
Team and Roles
We are a team of two designers, we both worked on UX strategies and then prepared UI screen designs for the same.
We collaborate with the below people as well to ensure smooth implementation:
- Business Analyst: To understand the requirements and scope of the project. Since this project was started as a POC, there were a lot of requirements that kept changing over time, hence constant involvement with BAs was crucial.
- Stakeholders: We are connecting with stakeholders at regular intervals to get feedback on designs. We have discussions and testing on low fidelity wireframes and sometimes even paper sketching to save time.
- Developers: To ensure that they understand the designs well, for them to have a smooth development phase.
Methodology
The project initially started as a POC. Hence we started with a design thinking methodology (Empathize— Define — Ideate — Prototype — Test).
Once the POC was successfully completed, we decided to follow Agile UX for this project since the requirements kept changing frequently and teams were doing iterative development. This embodied a periodic, incremental design approach to solving problems while focusing on development and timelines too. Design work was ahead of development by a minimum of one sprint.
Empathize
We carried out user research to reveal how customers used the compliance management platform, highlighting pain points and finding opportunities for improvement.
Below is the sample user interview questionnaire:
- Intro and what am I trying to do.
- What is your role in the team?
- How much time do you spend on PM Compliance tool per day?
- How did you get to know about PM Compliance tool for the first time?
- What is the biggest pain point related to PM Compliance tool?
- Show us actually how to raise compliance?
- Is there anything that you often look for on PM Compliance tool that is missing or hard to find?
- What is your main goal when visiting PM Compliance tool?
- What would prevent you from achieving the goal?
- What do you feel about the landing page on PM Compliance tool?
- How do you feel when you navigate between options on PM Compliance tool?
- How do you feel about the action buttons on PM Compliance tool?
- If you make any mistake on PM Compliance tool, how do you rectify it?
- How aware are you of compliance statuses?
- How do you think can we simplify the compliance process?
- How do you usually search for previously created compliances?
- What haven’t I asked today that you think would be valuable for me to know?
- May I contact you if I have any other questions regarding them?
Another part of the ongoing process was to conduct stakeholder interviews to help inform product decisions based on business requirements.
Below is the sample stakeholder interview questionnaire:
- Intro and what am I trying to do.
- What is the history of PM tool?
- What do you feel is the reason we are doing changes to PM tool?
- What are the goals of PM compliance tool?
- What is your role in the team?
- How long have you been in the team?
- What worries do you have with respect to PM compliance?
- Are you aware of the specific module in which the change will be done? If yes what do you know about the module?
- How easy or difficult is it to change the process of working?
- What are the major limitations you see with respect to PM Compliance tool?
- What haven’t I asked today that you think would be valuable for me to know?
- May I contact you if I have any other questions regarding them?
Collecting all of this information and synthesizing data for developing new ways of working play a critical role in how we help compliance management continually improve their platform.
Define
Based on the data collected, after synthesis, we could identify a huge number of challenges to the existing compliance platform.
In agreement with business analysts and stakeholders, below are the prioritized challenges that would be worked upon initially:
- No dashboard for compliance: Very complex to find an assigned or created compliance. Complicated even to search for other compliances.
- Restricted creation of compliance.
- Complex to manage multiple responses without filter options and also cannot be saved without filling in all mandatory details.
- No feedback on compliance completion.
Ideate
From the above-prioritized challenges, we have written HMWs for ideation to be more meaningful and simple:
- How might we make it easy to access previously created compliances?
- How might we make it easy to search compliances created by others, however, we have access to it?
- How might we make the creation of compliance simple for users?
- How might we make managing compliances with many checks easier to fill?
- How might we make searching checks in any compliance easier?
- How might we make filling checks simpler?
- How might we make sure we provide feedback on the completion of compliance?
The user flow journey of the compliance tool would be as below, to display the complete path a user takes when using a product, the same was agreed with all stakeholders:
We sketched a few solutions for the above HMWs considering the flow as shown below:
Prototype
A number of iterations for each screen were tried out in Figma so as to arrive at the best way to represent the solution to the problem. This allows us to arrive at a better way to solve a particular problem.
Once we took the approval, we designed the interface shown below:
The below link is to the prototype of the compliance tool:
Test
This stage is where we test out the design with users belonging to the user set. The core of this experiment is to know the following:
- Getting to know what users understand from the screens.
- Asking probing questions to know what users comprehend from the screen.
- Catching spontaneous reactions from users when they interact with the prototype.
We had a few iterations of changes, post which we handed over designs to the development team.
Future scope:
- I would like to work on making this for all the features of PM tool.
- I would like to add a few integrations which were not possible from the old tool, which would in turn make the experience of the user better.
Conclusion:
We have designed a new interface where users can view all the compliance which are created/assigned to them in the dashboard, they can easily search for any compliances, can filter the required checks in the compliance, they can check the completeness percentage, and also save the response for even one check in the compliance.
With this, we solved the user problems identified in the research phase.
