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UX strategy and storytelling: standardizing and streamlining the user registration experience.
Cengage’s highest priority project of 2019 was to streamline and standardize the registration and sign in flows for all users. This was a multi-year, multi-million dollar investment, involving several teams and all of Cengage’s many products and platforms. Winner of the OKTA Customer Experience Award, we were able to accelerate our projected roadmap to deliver desperately needed features and integrations from an 8-year plan to a 3-year plan.
Project Details
My Role
As Lead UX Designer and UX Strategist, I drove the research and design, and worked closely with the developers to craft and communicate the team’s approach to stakeholders and C-level executives. My strategic analysis was an important factor in persuading the team to invest resources in this project.
Results
New design rolled out on time for phase 1. There was a dramatic drop in customer service related issues post release.
So many platforms, so many problems
Since it was founded in 2007, Cengage accumulated many different platforms and products, which had resulted in a variety of inconsistent, problematic and sometimes insecure paths to creating accounts and accessing products for its tens of millions of users.
I started by doing audit of all of the onboarding workflows and products and a company-wide presentation to show the critical nature of the problem.
The challenge
The development challenge of this project involved taking legacy systems and radically rebuilding them. Moving from an on-prem architecture to the cloud meant that the dev team had to learn an entirely new codebase in a short period of time. As the lead designer it meant an opportunity for me to create a user-centered experience from the start, but I would need to leverage these new 3rd party tools as much as possible also in order to have the best shot at getting my designs implemented.
Just a few of the dozens of different legacy registration designs users were having to navigate
My process
Do the research
Define the Problem
Create User Scenarios
Define tiered solutions (Good, Better, Best)
Create and test prototypes
Tell the story
Helping the product manager to prioritize work
In order to help the team decide which approach to take, I analyzed all primary user scenarios for accessing products and created responsive workflows for versions that would improve the experience. I designed out several versions that the team collaboratively mapped to an impact vs effort matrix. This helped us visually prioritize which solution to start with based on our time and resource constraints.
User scenarios
Early on I wireframed workflows for all of the primary user scenarios to help the engineering team understand the broader vision so we could anticipate technical complications, dependencies, and the scope of work to come. The product manager used this documentation to inform the product roadmap.
Low fidelity prototypes
Early on I wireframed workflows for all of the primary user scenarios to help the engineering team understand the broader vision so we could anticipate technical complications, dependencies, and the scope of work to come. The product manager used this documentation to inform the product roadmap.
Style guides and design patterns
I defined accessible forms styles for the interface that would fit both Cengage styles and the pre-built 3rd party cloud based identity management tools.
Hi fidelity prototypes
Early on I wireframed workflows for all of the primary user scenarios to help the engineering team understand the broader vision so we could anticipate technical complications, dependencies, and the scope of work to come. The product manager used this documentation to inform the product roadmap.
Launch and impact
We implemented the new design for our flagship products, reduced customer service call volume, and improved user analytics across all of its Cengages platforms and systems.
