Zeta
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UX designer I/II
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Jan 2022 - Jun 2024
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Live
This project is under NDA - hence the limited usage of imagery when referring to designs. Please feel free to contact me to discuss more, thanks!
About Zeta
Zeta offers embeddable financial tech services to banks and financial institutions. Part of this offering is a suite of white-labelled products to allow the bank to operate and manage their Zeta-powered systems.
What is Support Center?
Support Center(SC) is one of the applications in this suite, and serves as the bank’s knowledge base for detailed customer information.
Its a key part of the bank’s customer support operations - and is used by support agents as the primary customer information center.
It allows the agents to get a deep understanding of the customer’s relationship with the bank and provide holistic customer support with relevant information and ability to perform requested actions.
Additionally, it is also the one of the first tools used to showcase the capabilities of our systems to a prospective client for Zeta.
Team, duration of the project
The main team comprised of a product manager, me as the primary UX designer, design manager, and a team of frontend engineers.
We also collaborated with the multiple backend teams who owned the several modules and systems that provided information to populate Support Center’s screens; and the design systems team.
This was a long term project (Jun 2022 - Apr 2024) that saw the evolution of Support Center along with our company’s offering and growth.
Recognition
Earned recognition for my efforts in the form 3 quarterly achievement awards - 2 Shining Stars, and 1 Mountain Mover.
TL;DR - business & design impact of the project
Reduction in average query handling time for agents over the long term - due to improved IA, routing, and referencibility
Reduction in time spent re-training agents for newer capabilities - due to increased consistency and predictability in experience patterns
Templates created reduced the SDLC & design intervention for smaller, iterative, and adhoc requirements - and freed up design effort for larger scale and more impactful tasks
Contributed to design system, and created a design system for the center to improve ease of updates & reusability of center components and patterns.
Improved file documentation for better context and rationale behind decisions
Clearer collaboration processes to ensure a step by step- product req grooming, design reviews, dev hand-offs, UX audits - led to usage of Jira for design project owrkflow management.
The journey begins - boarding a moving train, Oct 2021.
This was my first official project at Zeta after joining in September 2021, and it began with the ownership of a single module (loan products). It was an existing project which was in an semi-early stage, with some work done but still slightly fuzzy about where it was headed.
Over the next 6 months, this participation eventually grew to owning the whole center - and the process of assimilating the knowledge of all the systems involved and settling into working on the increased scope of requirements effectively.
Phase 2 - steadying the express, Jun 2022.
Once we had settled in and had a comfortable understanding of all modules , we took a look at the current state:
Since there was no single ownership for Support Center as a framework in the past, the various teams worked on their respective modules in isolation. This led to an inconsistent experience for our agents.
This was also at a point where we did not have a strong design system with little to no governance or implementation, and was in fact being redefined concurrently.
Identifying issues - what’s squeaking & rattling the loudest?
We did 2 major activities to identify our main problem areas we’d want to start focusing on.
A center-wide audit with the core team in 2 approaches
To detail and acknowledge known fundamental issues
To do a bugbash and list existing implementation issues and fix the low-effort high-impact issues to begin with.
Bugbash sheet. We later moved to Confluence/Jira for bug reporting.
Usability testing with the customer support team to understand their major issues, and also a session with them to generally get a sense of all their pain points.
Affinity mapping after doing a UT of the existing SC with 6 users of varying roles from the customer support team.
Core issues
Inconsistent UI and functionality - ex. tables looked different in different screens, and each had filters that worked a different way.
Poor optimization of vertical space
Mixed navigation patterns
No referencibility - inability to reference or compare multiple pieces of data before making a decision.
Lack of routing
Plan of action - Destination North Pole
Our first task was to establish processes to tackle all these issues while still delivering on the incoming stream of requirements on time.
Design adopted 2 paths - project and visioning.
The project track was driven by product and consisted of all the requirements/roadmap items we planned. The mindset here was delivery focused while incrementally improving and maintaining a consistent experience. The goal was to deliver all requirements on time, while incrementally improving the quality and consistency of the overall experience. Collaboration was key here and we began refining our ways of working and defined key steps in each delivery cycle. (product req grooming, design reviews, dev hand-offs, UX audits - led to having UX workflows in Jira)
The visioning track was design driven, and focused on ideating and solving bigger center wide issues and problem statements. This was much less constrained - and proposed solutions from here were usually broken down and added to the roadmap.
Creating time
Once we had settled into the process, we needed to free up time for design to think holistically about the center
Templates - reduced design intervention for smaller, iterative, and adhoc requirements - and free up design effort for larger scale and more impactful tasks
Inculcating the importance of quality and detail to attention - to reduce time spent in bug bashes and reworks.
We also only represented the ideal solution in our designs - and then product scoped it out accordingly - this contributed to the roadmap as well.
Phase 3 - rebuilding a moving train, Sep 2023
With the time created, we utilized it to take a look at the bigger, longstanding issues.
We also did another session of usability testing with the customer support team, this time to observe and understand their practical pain points.
Constraints
Of course a thought that came to our heads was to completely rebuild from scratch - but this was unrealistic and infeasible. We had to keep in mind that:
SC was in use by the customer support team (albeit in CUG testing) so any changes we make must not disrupt their current workflow too much - this meant that we can’t be having them extensively re-train their agents to use SC after any of our updates.
We still had to cater to all the incoming requirements and deliver them on time, while trying to fix some of the fundamental issues we had identified.
Be the first adopters and contributers of the newly-being-redefined design system and acknowledge that some basic components and capabilities may not be ready or available.
Acknowledging the issues - the rattly bits
We went back to the fundamental issues we wanted to look at:
Poor optimization of vertical space
Mixed navigation patterns
Ease of access and referencibility
Lack of routing
We first documented and mapped the existing IA of SC to see:
The hierarchy of information
The depth of navigation
Routing required
The various surfaces and patterns used for different types of information (modal, page, sidesheet, floating window, etc.)
Identify and document the patterns and guidelines as a result of phase 2.
Solutions - the seats, the doors, the windows, and the carriage
The first thing we did was to switch to a sidebar navigation - to free up vertical space and give us the flexibility to accommodate more items.
Routing to ensure easy usability for agents
Defining common navigation patterns to allow for predictability and consistency
Defining and documenting patterns, principles, and formats for content, casing, error states, CRUD, and more. - to ensure consistency, clarity, and speed up the design phase. Some of these patterns became contributions to our design system.
Created a design system for all the entities of the Support Center framework and documented all the flows in one file
This ensured anyone else working on SC knew where to start and build custom requirements remaining in line with the rest of the experience.
Implementation & quality control - all aboard!
While all this was going on - engineering had already started building the base scaffolding for the new SC. A big part of this was incorporating routing and re-defining the business components in order to allow quick updates - now or for the future.
I worked closely with the engineers and kept them constantly updated as this was still a continuously evolving project with multiple cycles of feedback from the various stakeholders and management involved. We also had formal and informal bug bashes to ensure we were proactive in finding, fixing, and minimizing bugs.
Another crucial aspect of making this implementation successful was working with the design system team to ensure compliance and audits - we collaborated closely here as well to improve our processes and make design system audits as part of our design workflow on Jira.