Sprink

Local Union 669's office processes revolved around an AS400 for forty years—that's a lot to unravel.

I built my foundational knowledge on client-provided process documentation that I used to document jobs to be done, site mapping the AS400, and completing a competitor analysis.

I collected any questions that surfaced to a questions register in Confluence that was later used during user interviews. This document became a vital tool for the entire team as we moved into and through the MVP phase because of the wealth of historical knowledge we were trying to "download" from an immensely complex and edge-case heavy process with 10 unique user types.

Mapping the AS400 was a cumbersome process, but intimately exposed me to the users' frustrating experience and revealed what parity features would be required for the MVP. This screenshot shows a fraction of the chaos that was the AS400.

I facilitated user interviews with 10 office admin to gain a deeper understanding of the overall processes that make the union run, users' daily job functions, and of course to uncover their wants and needs. We determined that the product would resolve these issues with the following solutions.

With a full picture of the office processes from an applicant to a retiring journeyman and everything in-between, I created a new sitemap and preliminary wireframes demonstrating what the tool could be.

The client was elated with the potential of how much easier their lives would be with the new product. They signed a contract to move forward with the MVP, but my work didn't stop there.

MVP Phase

Because of my uniquely close understanding of the current AS400 system and user workflows, the product owner asked me to assist in the creation of user stories. I wrote out the remaining 80% of the user stories for the MVP in Jira.

I was later brought back onto the project for UX near the completion of MVP design for the dashboard experience, non-member and unemployment workflows, and re-design the funds & payments in the member profile.

I determined that dashboard functionality would be life-changing for the office admin during user interviews. The dashboard would feed them information they currently needed to seek out through numerous reports down cumbersome workflows. It included live member metrics, member flags, and the ability to pin members and contractors. This functionality would save hours of time per week.

Non-member and unemployment workflows required determining how they would be treated within the new system (as a member type, status, or flag) compared to the AS400 lists.

Non-members were determined to be its entirely own entity outside of being a member. They required eight different use cases to cover all scenarios of how a non-member could exist within the system across the lifecycle of membership. These workflows also cover the path to becoming a member and the unique requirements for each scenario.

I determined unemployment would be a flag manually marked by the user in a member's profile when the member reported their unemployment. The workflows included marking unemployment, updating a variety of unemployment information, automatic flags, and removing the flag.

Funds & payments required a re-design to make it easier to understand at-a-glance what a member owed and if they had any credit, as well as enhancement to payments made to a member, by a member, and by contractors on their behalf.