Wayhome Customer Portal Redesign
Wayhome helps individuals buy homes through a shared ownership scheme.
Pecan is Wayhome’s internal CRM system where it originally stored all customer information and where the operations team managed everything relating to the customers.
Analysing the context
Pecan V1 was built only by engineers and had been incrementally improved upon over the years to accommodate immediate needs. This had been done without an overarching strategy or any involvement of the design team. In the end, it had become too complicated to use: it had several unnecessary functionalities, a confusing UX, an outdated UI, and most importantly – it wasn’t compatible with the backend customer APIs.
Planning the process
The front-end team reviewed the existing Pecan + the APIs to work out what functionalities would be feasible with the new pack of customer APIs. (3 days)
The design team conducted user research to understand the current users’ problems and needs, as well as the information structure. (3 days)
The design + front-end teams finalised user flows and the MVP, and also worked on design / prototypes (front-end and design explored working in parallel to deliver the MVP quicker). (5 days)
User testing was done using the prototype => Revised and finalised design (5 days)
Image credit: Gloria Lo - UXplant
My roles.
Led and managed the design process.
Collaborated with the front-end team to conduct user research, identify problems and run user testing.
Worked with developers to understand technical limitations, discuss design options, and conduct design QA.
Conduct user interviews
I conducted eight user interview sessions with eight users from four different functional teams. The purpose was to understand each team’s role, responsibility, and how they used and interacted with Pecan, as well as their problems, needs, and expectations.
Based on the user interviews, I divided them into two groups – primary and secondary users – and wrote user stories for each group.
The primary users included two teams that used Pecan every day. These users required a lot more than the bare minimum to perform their tasks and achieve their goals. Solving problems for this group would most likely benefit the low-maintenance users as well.
The secondary users only required the bare minimum to complete their tasks. These are the users that are easy to keep happy.
Approaching the design
User experience: the focus was to make sure users could easily navigate and instantly locate the information they need. I got rid of unused information, grouped the rest, and highlighted sections that were frequently used and had to be instantly accessible.
User interface: the key priority in applying the new design system was to keep the system’s look consistent with other toolings. Besides that, it was imperative to deliver the user experience we aimed for. To do this, I introduce left navigation, tabs, and sticky elements.
