Windstream Wincare

Challenge

Wincare is Windstream’s primary tool in their call centres for identifying and enrolling customers, diagnosing issues, and booking service calls. The user experience limited the capability of call center staff to quickly and efficiently solve customer issues. Quarry was hired to run workshops and UX design sprints to help improve the experience for call centre technicians, and ultimately for Windstream customers.

Roles

  • UX Design
  • User testing
  • Co-ran workshops

Process

The Wincare project was a by-product of an initial field-research study performed by Quarry’s Insights team. They shadowed call centres all over the US and identified a number of areas (including Wincare) that could be improved. With the research complete and Wincare identified as a area of opportunity, we began workshops and UX sprints.

  • User journey mapping

  • Heuristic analysis

  • Design edicts

  • Desktop and mobile UX Sprints

  • Documentation

Understanding users

The Insights team identified various characteristics of the target user that we could continually come back to during our design process to make sure we were hitting the mark.

Most memorable to me is the kind of person who works in a call centre is someone who genuinely loves helping people. Imagine your job being held up by the main piece of technology you’re required to use. Maybe that’s not too hard. Turns out empathy flowed freely to all parties involved in this challenge.

User Characteristics

  • Sincere desire to help people
  • Deep affinity for solving problems and making things better
  • Motivated to learn, grow, and succeed

Working environment

    • Hack sheets

    • Motivational posters/stickies

    • Bible verses

    • Foxhole buddies

    • Swivel chairing

User Journey Mapping

We held a multi-day workshop with clients to identify key user journeys and map out their corresponding tasks and stories. We then selected the most complex and error-prone tasks to take to the design phase.

Heuristic Analysis

To kick the project off, we did a thorough heuristic analysis of every page of the application in desktop and mobile. We identified UX issues and inconsistencies and documented every occurrence in a workbook we delivered to Windstream. With a full analysis complete, we identified common themes to focus on during the UX sprints.

  • Provide focus for the users by simplifying to essentials
  • Consolidate UI language
  • Address design bugs
  • Indicate when background processes are running or pages are loading
  • Simplify controls that impede navigation or user interaction

Design Process

For our desktop and mobile sprints we followed a structured process that started with the user, progressed through sketches, wireframes and design, and then back to users for validation. We stayed agile and iterated based on user feedback before finalizing and documenting all interactions, UX and UI improvements.

Solution

We ended up with a comprehensive set of documents and clickable prototypes that defined a solid direction for the Windstream engineering team for both their desktop and mobile Wincare experience.

Outcome

Our main goal was to improve the user experience for call centre staff and ultimately for everyday telecommunication customers. Our work gave the Wincare engineering team the tools they needed to make significant improvements to their application experience.

Our second goal was to educate and equip the team to put the user first and follow UX best practices. We accomplished this by explaining at each step in the process and documenting the reasons behind our choices. We were rewarded when our client presented his thinking on a workflow that wasn’t on Quarry’s roadmap, and we could clearly see the customer-centric and logical approach to his solution.