Incident Management Project

OVERVIEW

A high profile client of Cutover, asked for a bespoke solution of improving their major incident management workflows and systems.


Prior to Cutover, they had been using a combination of Microsoft Excel and Salesforce which proved to be a very messy and troublesome system, littered with pain-points throughout the user journey.

Working closely with a project manager from Cutover, client stakeholders known as major incident managers and the Head of Design at Cutover, we set out to provide a solution for their ITDR.

ROLE

UX & UI Designer

User research, Wireframing, Interaction Design, UI Design, Prototyping, Testing & Iteration

DURATION

6 Months

Problems

  • Disjointed user experience.

    • Information gathered in excel is executed in salesforce and then manually fed back into excel.

    • Lack of UX consideration means that the experience is loitered with pain-points which could otherwise be streamlined.

  • Long pipeline to success

    • If an incident was to take place with the existing solution, the disjointed and bespoke nature of the process meant that systems weren’t recovered for a long time. Time that could otherwise be saved.

  • Heavy dependance on particular user groups

    • Major Incident Managers, the key user group for handling incidents and disaster recovery responses, were very heavily depended upon with the existing system. Calls at 4 AM were unfortunately commonplace for these users.

  • Lackluster information

    • The presentation of information on excel tends to be very messy, inconsistent and made the overall process for successfully recovering from a disaster much longer.

  • Poor communication

    • Communication between user groups was siloed and decentralised, often dependant on major incident managers (whom weren’t always available).

Objectives

  • Address performance and UX challenges by optimising design.

  • Enhance feature visibility and implement interactive, automated functionalities.

  • Optimise visualisations for easy interpretation and actionable insights.

  • Sreamline communication between user groups involved.

Process

Stakeholder Interviews

  • Aligned expectations to ensure a shared understanding of project goals, timelines, and outcomes.

  • Explored stakeholder perspectives to gain insights into the product's purpose, features, and user needs.

  • Identified assumptions underlying their expectations and beliefs about the project.

  • Discovered gaps in knowledge and areas requiring further exploration.

  • Established strategy and communication outlining communication channels and methods to keep all parties informed.

  • Explored potential limitations or challenges ensuring a realistic understanding of project boundaries.

Research Methods

  • Evaluated and analysed the low-fidelity designs.


  • Engaged in frequent conversations with BAs and users to ensure a shared understanding of project goals, timelines, and outcomes.

  • Researched existing dashboard UI platforms such as Notion, Power BI Galleries, Klipfolio and Tableau.

  • Explored rationale and considerations behind dashboard design.


  • Established strategy and communication outlining communication channels and methods to keep all parties informed, especially given that the key client users live in a different timezone.

Findings

Leveraging my research and stakeholder interviews, alongside low fidelity designs and the project manager’s initial findings, I was able to make the following observations:

  • Dashboards provide direct access to features, enhancing user experience by eliminating disruptive modals.

  • Users can arrange widgets to match preferences.

  • Dashboards can aid in the consolidation of features and data sources.

  • Real-Time updates can be employed, ensuring users access the latest information.

Ideation

During my ideation process, I focused on establishing levels of functionality within the pods.


This involved making them collapsible and expandable, while also exploring different states and arrangements.

The key here was to ensure that the functionality of the pods fulfilled the requirements that the combination of salesforce and excel was fulfilling in a more intuitive and user friendly way.

Mockups

I brought my ideation concepts to life through a detailed visual representation of what they could look like on the platform.

At this stage what was also vital was checking in with key stakeholders, making sure that the proposed design was meeting their requirements.

UI Design

To combat clutter among features and states, I optimised design for performance, UX, and feature visibility. Inspired by Adobe Illustrator, I added a customisable dashboard feature.

Users can personalise their view by selecting preferred pods/apps and custom fields, streamlining the experience and enhancing engagement.

Prototyping

Prior to development, I built a functional, fully interactive prototype of the interface. The prototype was instrumental in validating the design with the client, which product managers and executives from cutover used to demo our solution.

More importantly, it allowed us to iterate via feedback directly from the client and the end user. Catching easy fixes and improvements early in the development process, where otherwise it would cost valuable time and man power to add or fix post development.