From product strategic visioning to design north-star solutions
"Agent's note-taking experience enhancement" as an example
Date
Nov 2023- onging
Role
Product designer
Responsibility
- Discovery of all problems
- Synthesis of problems/pain points holistically based on user journey
- Organizing workshop and facilitating ideation with stakeholders, engineers, users & designers
- User validation and qualitative data collection with UX researcher
- Design of product including all the iteration
Product
Athena
Abstract
By the end of each year, many product teams will start planning the vision of next year and also coming up with north star ideas. In this article, I'll go through the case of:
1. how we designers empower the product team facilitate idea collection through workshop
2. how we convert ideas from the workshop to design solutions
For better elaboration, I'll raise "Agent's note-taking experience enhancement" an an example.
Background
Agoda
Agoda is online travel platform, helps travellers book hotels and properties worldwide, plus flights, activities, and more. Agoda.com and the Agoda mobile app are available in 39 languages and supported by 24/7 customer support.
CEG
Customer Experience Group (CEG) is essentially our support center team. Our team assists our customers and partners with their post-booking questions and requests. CEG is very special as it is the only team in Agoda that deals directly with our customers.
Athena
Athena is a case management system used by customer service department of Agoda. It is used to handle tickets from our hotel and customers. Athena is a new in-house tool that replaced legacy tools like TOBO(Travel Operations Backoffice) in efforts to consolidate the various tools CEG agents use (1 CEG 1 Tool).
Note
During agents' handling cases, taking note is a necessary step for jotting down:
1. What problem customer/partners are facing
2. What I did for solving the case as an agent
3. What to do next for the case follow-up
To define the vision 2024
For the year 2024, Athena tool is going to be improved in 3 areas:
1. efficiency & automation of agent's note-taking
2. efficiency & automation of other features than note
3. multi-product handling for future scalability
Process
Due to the complexity of CEG with xx departments and different domains, we would conduct workshop and focus group discussion for idea collection and validation
1. Workshop
To define the directions the product moving forward after the finish of last iteration.
- Expected outcome:
1) Identify pain points of status quo
2) Brainstorm solutions
3) Build database of initiatives
3) Build database of initiatives
- Participant
1) 48+ people
2) From 11 departments in the organization
2) From 11 departments in the organization
2. Idea synthesis & business screening
After collecting all the ideas, we conducted a few rounds of FGD on ideas' prioritization and screening according to business strategy, teach feasibility and estimated impact
3. Vision milestone
Based on the idea clusters, designer and product owner will co-created a preliminary milestone list.
4. Estimate & roadmap
Product owner and IT devs will estimate a early-stage roadmap based on business KPI
Agent's note-taking experience enhancement
Vision
Leverage GPT to write notes faster and consistently includes standardized formatting, auto completion/correction, and
PII detection & auto-masking
Design solution
As mentioned in the process section, we summarized the final solutions from the workshop and focus group. Those are:
Feature mapping
In order to figure out where to apply the new features into the product, we utilized user journey of Athena and matched all the new features to certain pages.
During the user journey of Athena, agent will go through:
Receiving inbound phone/email/message --> Verifying the contact party --> Handling cases
In this process, agents need to read notes left by previous agents and write notes while handling. The main page we are going to touch will be: note log & note editor.
Solution
What's next
Till now the project's ongoing. Based on the north star design, we are going to have a few rounds of discussion of CEG biz & product & IT for feature prioritization. After that we'll finalize the design and break it down into incremental phases for implementation & experiment.