Story Of A Manufacturer.

Research And Discovery Case Study

Client : Cox Automotive Europe
My Role : UX Researcher
Project Time: 5 Months
Team: 1 Product Manager + Various Stakeholders (Sales, Customer Experience, Product, Business Analyst, Architecture and Delivery)

Background

Background

As part of Cox Automotive's digital transformation and becoming more product lead an initiative was created to get closer to our customers and end users to better understand the journey when interacting with our products and services so we could identify area of opportunities for the business and improvement for the customer.

Discovery - Round 1

Methods Used

Stakeholder Interviews
Semi-Structured Interviews
Workshops
Personas

Research Planning

For round one of the discovery work we wanted to define what our high level research objectives. To do this I ran a collaborative workshop with key stakeholders to align and prioritise the key research goals which would then help define the plan to allow us to pick the best research method and roadmap the research schedule.


Overall Findings

  • Most Electricity team users spent most of their working day site level or MPAN level(e.g Supply Period) within the legacy application as they tended to deal with individual queries on a site by site basis.
  • Most data needed for analyst to deal with day to day work was at site level
  • Electricity Team staff mostly users dealt with issues on a site level which meant they spent most of their time on the supply period screen.

Communicate Plan

Once the high level research objectives were agreed these were then Placed into a research question tracker so each research objective could be tracked. The plan was then defined showing the purpose of the study, business objectives, research methods, profile of customer and roadmap. This was then communicated and aligned with key stakeholders before commencing the research.

Key Outcomes

  • Show only relevant data and fields
  • Lots of information provided but it was poorly grouped
  • Lack of clear labelling for groups, input options, and filter operators
  • Doesn’t show the most important data to see from a high-level overview
  • Active data gets moved, even though it is still active.
  • Have to do export records via DB because we can’t set the max records to 1000 in the UI.
  • Too much clicking

Stakeholder Interviews

As part of the initial research we wanted to build a picture of the experience for a Manufacturer through the end to end journey using our products and services. These would help us map out our internal understanding of the customer journey including goals, actions, pain points and internal capabilities along that journey. To achieve this we identified and spoke to various experts and key stakeholders within the business with knowledge of particular verticals. Thematic Analysis was carried out with key outcomes from the themes summarised.

Show and Tell

The key findings from round one of the research were communicated back with a show and tell session. We then aligned and discussed each finding and agreed on why the data was important so all stakeholders were aligned prior to the user journey mapping workshop.

Define - Round 1

Methods Used

Thematic Analysis
Journey Mapping
Workshops
Personas


User Journey Workshop

To now build up this information into a journey map I facilitated a remote workshop to build up the key steps of the journey and plug in the activities, goals and pains across that journey that we had found out during the initial research.
To finalise we transferred the digital map to pyschical so this could be presented back to strategic teams in workshops and presentations at key times during the research.

Living Journey Map

Architecture Mapping

As part of our customer journey we wanted to capture the actions and systems behind the scenes in terms of capabilities, services and software that exists at each stage. To fill these gaps and produce a better visual understanding of this i facilitated a workshop with the core architecture team to utilise their knowledge to full the gaps so we could link this to product and services and the journey from the customers perspective.
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After the initial round of research we had produced an "As Is" view of the customer journey for a car manufacturer when interacting with Cox Automotive's products and services to help us better understand them. We now needed to look at this journey from an outside-in view lense to validate our assumptions and gain new insights into the end to end journey for a manufacturer.