Allegiance Fundraising
Product re-design for radio traffic platform
Overview
Allegiance Fundraising offers fundraising, marketing and technology solutions that inspire action and create a lasting impact. As part of their technology solutions, Allegiance provides a radio traffic and billing software built specifically for non-commercial broadcasters.
With the potential to open up their radio traffic & billing system to commercial broadcasters, Allegiance partnered with our UX team with the goal of increasing usability and updating their traffic tool from a software based product to a web accessible platform.
Timeline
Aug - Sep 2020
Role
UX Research
Product Design - UX/UI
Tools
Figma
Keynote
Zoom
Methodologies
User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, Feature Prioritization, Design Studio, User Flow, Wireframes, Prototypes, Usability Tests
Problem
Allegiance Radio Traffic provides traffic logs, digital billing, and production management services to public radio stations across the US. The product currently requires weeks of training when on boarding new clients and has been known to feel “clunky” and "outdated” by users.
How might we streamline the Allegiance system to ensure a quick and accurate workflow?
Research
I conducted remote user interviews with 11 Allegiance users across the USA. Questions revolved around understanding the individual’s current work flow through the system, discovering the pain points they deal with, and observing the most accessed features within the software.
Through affinity mapping, I was able to gather insights to create a persona, Katherine, who represents the commonalities and themes exhibited by our users.
User Persona
Key Insights
She finds saving contacts to be counterintuitive. Contacts affect other areas within her workflow such as billing and underwriting.
She was manually confirming billing information by exporting statements to PDF in order to view what it would look like.
There are too many buttons that do the same thing as well as too many windows to complete one task.
The favorites section takes up a majority of the homepage real estate but she did not understand the benefits of it and often left it blank.
With these key insights discovered, I was able to pinpoint the three focus areas to streamline within this comprehensive software.
Home Page
Contacts
Billing
Vision & Design
Design studio was conducted where our team did rapid low fidelity sketching of ideas, iteration, ideating and collaborating. We came to a decision on our redesign which incorporated all the essential features determined before.
Sketches & Mid-Fi wireframes
Medium fidelity wireframes were then designed and prototyped for the first round of usability testing.
Mid-Fi Usability Test
Three scenarios and tasks were tested with Allegiance users. At the end of the test, users were asked to rate their ease of use and overall satisfaction on a scale of 1-5 (5 being the desired number).
Key Takeaways
Although all users succeeded in all tasks, there were indirect paths taken.
4/5 users took multiple attempts before finding the “Other Contacts” dropdown to successfully update the account’s primary contact.
Solution: Move “Other Contacts” higher up on the dropdown options for more visibility.4/5 users struggled understanding the “Options” dropdown for task three.
Solution: Clarify copy above Options2/5 users clicked “Export” instead of “Preview” to print for task three.
Solution: Add printer icon to Preview dropdown to indicate available print options
Hi-Fi wireframes
Home Page
In contrast to the large gray space on the existing software, the home page now functions as a dashboard with focus on the primary buttons in the middle of the screen. In the current system, the analysis and reports bar is fixed to the left side of the screen. As this is not a highly accessed area, the new design functions as a collapsible menu which can be accessed anytime throughout the site.
Contacts & Contracts
The current system requires multiple screens and tabs in order to access the correct area to update a primary contact as well as access contracts. The redesign consolidates the two screens into one viewable and convenient page.
Billing
The existing system lists out a large options menu with checkboxes which take up the right hand side of the screen. The redesign integrates all the options into a compact dropdown menu instead.
Currently, users are not able to preview statements and documents without having to export to PDF first. The redesign features a preview and print/email window where users can easily preview important statements and documents with ease.
Next Steps
For immediate action, we would taken into account feedback from the high-fidelity usability test and:
Change the copy of “Clients” to “Accounts”
Move the “Add New Contact” button to the “Other Contacts” section.
Adding some copy in the dropdown field of “Document Options” to indicate a preview of available options.
For further development should we continue to work on this project:
Look into adding a “Quick Access” bar on the home page as replacement to favorites.
Focus our attention on streamlining the “Log” function of the system.
Final Thoughts
The client was very pleased with what we delivered after this 2.5 week time frame. It was very interesting to everyone involved that what the client initially thought were problems ended up to be different once we spoke with the users. This truly shows us that you may think you know what your users want, but at the end of the day you are not the user.
From this project I learned how to break down an extremely comprehensive system into chunks and discover the main areas of focus. I had absolutely no background or prior existing knowledge of the radio traffic system, but was able to learn through user interviews and walkthroughs of the product.