Senior-Level UX Designer / UX Researcher
Product Designer / Program Manager
Team Leader
PlayNetwork
Music curators create custom playlists for retail spaces to enhance their customer experience and increase revenue.
PlayNetwork delivers the music for Starbuck, Hilton, Urban Outfitters, and many major brands and corporations
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Music curators create custom playlists for retail spaces to enhance their customer experience and increase revenue.
ABOUT PLAYNETWORK
PlayNetwork's products are ubiquitous yet you've never heard of the company. That music at Starbucks? That's PlayNetwork.
PlayNetwork creates hand-crafted branded playlists and delivers music through their proprietary networked music player devices.
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450 Brands
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185,000 locations
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127 countries
As the only UX designer, I supported 3 teams of developers. Projects included an iOS app to provisioning devices, a dashboard for Customer Service to monitor and troubleshoot devices, and the core web app used to curate and program playlists for our clients.
AV Road Rules
Though intended to reduce costs through internet connectivity, the new devices failed often and created a growing backlog of open service tickets.
Ambiguous indicators on the existing dashboard quickly frustrated CS reps and delayed resolution of issues.
After listening to stakeholders across the company, I identified and enumerated the project goals to align expectations and priorities.
Though intended to reduce costs through internet connectivity, the new devices failed often and created a growing backlog of open service tickets.
FAILING DEVICES WITHOUT VISIBILITY
PlayNetwork deployed new solid-state devices in client locations only to find them unreliable. Clients angrily called Customer Service while quickly CS reps grew frustrated with the recently released Device Manager Dashboard and its ambiguous indicators.
My task was to design a new Device Manager that
1) Enabled CS reps to easily diagnose device issues
2) proactively highlight failing devices to prevent service interruptions and service calls
3) filter devices by specific attributes like client and version to discover issues across related devices
4) stretch goal - filter and rollup views by client to enable accounts with internal IT groups to monitor their own devices
AV Road Rules
I built out this flow through patient discussions with senior testers, developers, and CS reps. First with post-its, then in electronic form, stakeholders contributed to, validated, and unified behind this step-by-step comprehensive flow.
I began by writing out the expected use cases and benefits the dashboard would provide users and stakeholders.
Point-in-time analysis serves to remediate troubled devices. Showing performance over time helps PlayNetwork catch and fix devices before they hit critical failure points.
I built out this flow through patient discussions with senior testers, developers, and CS reps. First with post-its, then in electronic form, stakeholders contributed to, validated, and unified behind this step-by-step comprehensive flow.
FINDING ANSWERS FROM UNTAPPED SMEs
To design an effective dashboard that supports device monitoring and remediation processes, I identified 7 stakeholder roles affected by poor performance of the devices. The earlier project team had not done this, and customer service did not sufficiently understand how to troubleshoot the devices. I narrowed the focus of the project to accurate and timely reporting of failing devices because all other metrics depended on this.
By sitting with senior testers of the devices and customer service reps, I detailed the probable causes of device failure and charted a step-by-step process to isolate and resolve them. The key decision points became the prominent data points to be displayed on the dashboard. The troubleshooting decision tree became a core training tool for customer service.
AV Road Rules
VISUALIZING KEY INDICATORS
Early designs began on a whiteboard where I could collaborate quickly with stakeholders. The process was to draw out design assumptions and intentions from them using open-ended questioning and rapid reflection of their comments into visualizations. Once a candidate design direction stabilized, the process continued in electronic form.
AV Road Rules
Critical and common points of failure map directly to unambiguous and prominent indicators to enable quick and specific responses.
The design was built in Axure with a high level on interactivity that demonstrated the primary use cases identified in the user research. Filtering by state and client, rollovers, and device details ensured full coverage for testing with CS reps and stakeholders.
Critical and common points of failure map directly to unambiguous and prominent indicators to enable quick and specific responses.
VALIDATING SUCCESS
Mocking up the Device List enabled me to review and test the design with the targeted user groups. Feedback led me to isolate the key indicators and develop an icon language to communicate status based on severity and duration of issues.