Atlas​
*In compliance with a non-disclosure agreement, sensitive information has been changed, redacted, or removed from this case study.
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Overview
Atlas is a global enterprise sales planning tool deployed in 6 continents. The goal of the tool is to support the analysis, strategizing, and entry of sales plans to help teams achieve and exceed their sales goals. The team’s work was recognized with an award of which there are only 100 recipients globally.
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Challenges
The major challenge was understanding the underlying similarities of the planning processes across the globe, as they appeared to be very different on the surface. Additionally, this was my introduction to agile. Previously, I never learned how to confine the design process to this framework, so there was a lot to learn.
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​My Role
​I was the research lead responsible for conducting a vision workshop, discovery interviews, analysis, problem definition, participatory design workshops, wireframes, usability testing, and quality assurance testing.
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​The Team
I was part of a two-person UX team working alongside 20+ developers within a scaled Agile framework. We reported to the Project Manager and Business Lead, while working closely with the development team to ensure proper implementation of designs.
Process
We started off working with stakeholders and top executives to understand the desired business outcomes, possible pitfalls of the project, and the most important user tasks. I facilitated an alignment workshop to help the team come to an agreement on the definitions of success.
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After aligning on the top priorities, we used these concepts to generate discovery objectives. From these objectives, we put together an interview script to help us understand the overall sales planning process, user tasks, goals, and pain points. I interviewed and observed 50 users across the globe, in supply chain, finance, and sales to understand their work and collaboration.
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We used an affinity diagram to help us generate a process diagram. This helped us see the discontinuity in the current process, and opportunities for improvement. We also created two personas.
Affinity Diagrams
Process Diagrams
Personas
We then formulated a series of problem statements (one for each key task), which were used to conduct a design studio workshop with users. Despite the intensive discovery, the knowledge of users helped us produce more divergent ideas. The UX team refined the ideas to produce sketches and eventually wireframes. We began usability testing, prioritized the severity of issues, and eventually created high fidelity mockups as the iterations continued. The high-fidelity wireframes were our final deliverables.
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After the minimum viable product, we continued to work on new features with occasional research spikes as needed, followed by more mockups and iterative testing. As each feature was completed in development, we performed UX quality assurance evaluations before giving the stamp of approval.
