Overview

Custom configuration & tooling

TLDR

FedEx wanted its digital healthcare experience branded, as a way to increase employee adoption. We'd solved similar requests with engineering resources in the past but needed a scalable solution. At the same time, our existing client configuration tool was due for some updates.

By incorporating user feedback, reinforcing our pattern library standards, and tightening our feedback cycle, I met the design request and (with my product cohort) reduced the average configuration time cost by 15%.

This case study is similar to the many other tooling projects I completed while collaborating with engineering and product teams throughout Rally and United Healthcare. I led the tooling design for several internal product lines, including Rewards Packages & Marketplaces, Client Configuration, Smoking Cessation, and Virtual Care Delivery.

Project Results

15% reduction in time cost over a multi-day process for Client Activation.
Unified efforts and developed a relationship with the responsible product team to provide continual support through future projects.
I received Rally’s “Rockstar” award in 2020, partially for my work and unification on this project.

Clients wanted to customize the theme, header navigation, & footer navigation

About

Small team, large organization

My role

Project Lead for Product Design

Process & Deliverables

Wireframes, Flows, Clickable Prototypes, Iterative Design, Stakeholder Review, User Research, Design System updates, building ongoing relationships between teams.

Collaborating with

Engineering, Product Management, Customer Support, Customer Facing Design teams, and a variety of interests across the organization.

About the team

Internal Tooling focuses on efficiently solving complex problems and building relationships between products/departments. I worked closely with multiple product teams and business interests. We maintained and updated an established design system and ecosystem of tools. The design department itself included 60-70 people – with two designers total dedicated to Internal Tools.

About the product

As a subsidiary of United Healthcare, Rally benefits corporate buyers through cost savings due to increased preventative care and health engagement. Rally’s digital health experience incentivizes members to complete health screenings, develop healthy habits, and navigate their health plans. Employees can earn points and marketplace rewards through personalized programs, company challenges, and health tracking.

The Project

Helping clients create branded experiences

Healthcare is complicated. When a user navigates from their employer's website to their healthcare portal, they don't always understand the boundary or transition between those two experiences. It can create uncertainty for the end-user and provide an excuse to delay important decisions. It can be harder for users to trust the new website and experience they're in.

To increase employee adoption and preventative care, FedEx wanted to customize its digital experience with a branded theme and custom navigation. They hoped this would create a more seamless transition for employees navigating their health benefits.

As an organization, we wanted to add customer value by letting organizations control those decisions — including self-service in the long term. The solution needed to be efficient and had to map to the limitations of what could be customized systematically. Creating a WYSIWYG editor was out of scope and required too much maintenance to be a viable first pass.

The default navigation and branding

Desired customization to theme and navigation

It seems like a simple request, but the changes introduce enough complexity to require management — especially when the product offering varies between clients and customer profiles. Adding customization, however, buys us goodwill with important clients.

The Problem

Experiences within context

The primary request was to add configuration options for client themes with potential self-serve in the future. But, it was also part of a larger organizational push to streamline our client intake and renewals into a more consolidated process.

In exploratory discussions and feedback with Customer Support leads, I heard that the existing activation tool required more training than other tools because of its non-standard patterns. This exacerbated an already high turnover rate for those teams.

The existing tool used non-standard patterns which confused end users

It can be tempting for teams to meet approaching deadlines by skipping the design process in favor of ad hoc solutions. While well-meaning, this can create unintended downstream effects for the end-users who operate within a larger ecosystem of tools. In this particular tool, custom components had been built to solve requirements without feedback from the design team. This confused end-users who expected the tool to follow the same patterns as the other tools they used.

Consistency between tools is essential because the users experience large gaps in their usage of the tools. Client activation, for example, only happens during the last 1-2 months of each year. For this reason, one of our goals as a design team was to develop deeper relationships with product teams to provide continual support through iterative cycles and user feedback.

Process

Getting early feedback

For internal tools, the users were also coworkers. Discovery was a less distinct process because we had continuous feedback from many of the teams we worked with. Research often took the form of recurring meetings with team managers. In early feedback from Customer Support managers, they described needing a simplified process and more overview. The process of configuring a client requires lots of starts and stops. Plans tended to finalize as they went through a requirement gathering stage between clients and a complex healthcare system. However, the existing tool wasn't giving them enough direct feedback, and users had trouble understanding the configuration holistically.

It wasn’t showing enough of the configuration's progression to end users or helping them know what tasks remained. It also wasn’t giving the team a final review flow to check against. From past projects, I knew that they preferred a linear workflow because it made training easier and allowed users to complete or return to steps as information was gathered.

Early wireframes accepted the existing tool's framing, but didn't address the problem

Pre-existing side panels

What customer support really wanted was a stepped flow. Unfortunately, this also meant convincing the product team. They’d voiced early opposition to the possibility because it felt visually outdated - which I understand. Enterprise tools seldom get accused of being glamorous. In early wireframes, I'd investigated non-linear options that extended the existing tool's framing of the problem. But in talking through our options, they also understood how we weren’t solving our users’ core problems in the current model.

Without a linear flow, we weren't addressing the needs of admins and end-users

Pre-existing side panels

Moving Forward

Balancing efforts

With an agreed-upon direction for structuring the tool, I set up a second round of iterations to discuss the added functionality with engineers and the product team. In particular, creating custom navigation was the request with the highest ambiguity and potential risk. I presented three solutions with varying difficulty levels to better understand the team's bandwidth and priorities. This gave me a better idea of where to concentrate my efforts and how to balance the needs of different stakeholders.

Option 1 - Low initial effort, Higher overhead

This option presented a bare minimum solution that would meet the requirements. It would minimize the engineering effort but depend on customer support members managing the complexity. We all agreed that it was too opaque and wouldn't translate well into a self-service product in the future.

Option 1 – least effort

Pre-existing side panels

Option 2 – medium effort, looking for an analog

A second option adapted navigation patterns we'd seen in site builders like Wix. It provided a simplified WYSIWYG view but seemed a little clunky - particularly with the addition of customized footer navigation.

2nd wireframe, using sitebuilders as a working example

Pre-existing side panels

Option 3 - Highest effort, most direct mapping

I expected this to be out of scope, but put it in as an upper bound because it mapped the navigation in a direct way. Users would see the default navigation for the purchased configuration of products. But, they'd be able to re-arrange and rename the products accordingly.

A drag and drop otion that mapped to the default navigation

Pre-existing side panels

To my surprise, they loved the drag & drop solution. I had fully expected to do some horse trading and combine elements into a fourth solution. But, they agreed that it mapped out the most directly and fed into the larger goal of transitioning to a more self-service model. In some ways, I think the added complexity of drag & drop offset their perceived stigma in building a stepped navigation pattern. In follow-up discussions and reviews with the Customer Support team, they loved the direction and helped us refine the details.

Solution

What we built

The initial changes that we built were well received. The product underwent several updates as we continued to add functionality and make improvements. We followed the existing design library standards and were able to add the drag-and-drop UI to the library. Other teams were excited about the project and eager to add their products to customization options.

Filtering and search made finding specific configurations easier

Product configuration was brought into a single screen along with contextual information

After turning off default navigation, users began customization

Making editing & configuration more direct

Using stepped navigation added a review step for confirmation

Future states includes WYSIWYG and separating branding from navigation

Outcome

How it worked out, and what I learned...

The project resulted in substantial 15% time cost savings for the customer support team. They were happy to have a more standardized tool, and this bought us goodwill in future projects.
Knowing what I know now, I would have advocated for usability testing with the actual end users. I relied on their direct managers for feedback and input. Having since done discovery work and testing between both admin and end-users, I know there's an important gap in perception between those two roles. I'm sure the tool is closer than where we were beforehand. But, I think testing could have uncovered further improvements across tools.
I recognize that it's not the flashiest design work! It followed an established design system and added to those patterns where necessary. There are many things I'd do differently in terms of UI if this were a personal project. But the UI was secondary to achieving results efficiently, in collaboration with others in a complex system.
I'm proud that the relationship between the Switchboard product team and Tools greatly improved. After the project, we continued to work closely and iterated on smaller details in tighter cycles.