Project: Designing tools to streamline business

Client: Vonage

Sector: Telecom

Responsibilities:
Workshop Facilitation, User Journeys, Hypothesis Driven Design, Service Design, UX Design, Prototyping, Research & Testing, Business Strategy.

The challenge

Vonage APIs  is a business unit of Vonage that develops and markets communication APIs to allow developers and businesses to rapidly innovate the way they interact with their customers. The past few years have been a time of major change within the company, a combination of rapid growth and assimilation into the larger Vonage business family. Since they sell and support a very wide range of cloud communication products in hundreds of countries around the world, they decided that introducing an extensive, and constantly updated, knowledge base would allow employees to be as effective and efficient as possible. They would be able to quickly and easily locate and access product information while minimising the need to send questions to other departments. Cue a call to Furthermore! We were asked to design an internal tool to help improve the information organisation at Vonage and streamline business processes.  

Our approach

We kicked things off with an immersion and research sprint, familiarising ourselves with the complexity of the Vonage business and running a series of collaborative workshops with Vonage stakeholders in order to better identify the project goals and KPIs as well as the existing user journey and workflow. We also facilitated a series of 1-on-1 interviews with employees from around the business in order to ensure we had a full picture of the challenges and pain points they were facing in the existing system.

We realised early on in the immersion phase that although everyone at Vonage was facing similar challenges, there was a wide range of opinions on how the challenges could be best solved. We worked to navigate through the many perspectives in order to formulate a series of hypotheses we could begin to design around.

Moving into the design phase, we started with another collaborative workshop, this one focused on ideating and sketching around solution ideas. So we were not limiting creativity, we began brainstorming without any restrictions, at a place where the sky is the limit. Once we had our ideas on paper we began to shape the designs around the business needs and internal parameters, creating a clearer picture of the MLP (Minimum Loveable Product).

Taking the best concepts from the initial sketching session we moved into rapid design sprints to prototype key templates for the new tool. We worked closely with the Vonage team throughout this process, using both remote and in-person meetings to get feedback and talk through some of the tougher interaction challenges. We set out to build a flexible, extensible and extremely easy to use tool.

Once we had a design system that was working well, we moved into a higher fidelity prototyping sprint, creating a clickable prototype of the tool using front-end code. Although lo-fi prototypes are great in many situations, the user interactions within this tool are complex and we knew that it would be far more beneficial to have a prototype that testers could actually use and interact with.

We facilitated a combination of remote and in-person tests with internal Vonage users and gathered a mountain of insightful feedback about the prototype. Once we had time to synthesise all the data, we collated it into a presentation for stakeholders along with our refined design hypotheses and a selection of key business decisions that we had identified as being crucial next steps in the process. We helped facilitate critical discussions around the pros and cons of the different challenges and helped the whole team come together on a proposed solution.

We worked closely with Vonage and their chosen development partner to help bring our designs to life and we are excited to now be working with them on the next stage of the project.

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