Vikas Jangam | PLG Related Work Samples
AEP - Automatic Bill Payment System
Scope: User Research, Stakeholder Alignment. UX Design, UI Design, Deployed. | Status: Deployed
Problem Space: AEP decided to move away from a third-party vendor and build its own software for automatic bill payments.
Duration: 12 weeks
As the lead designer on the project, I worked with the PO, team, and several other internal stakeholders to define the product's UX strategy and design a product that met both users’ needs while also aligning with stakeholder expectations.
Users Needs:
Some users did not know AEP was offering a free auto-pay option at all.
The existing auto-pay took a long time to get activated. Many avoided it because of that.
Users had concerns about situations where there were not enough funds in the account or if a payment went through on time.
They felt that it was more difficult to manage auto-pay than it was to make monthly payments by themselves.
Stakeholders:
AEP offered several bill payment options alongside automatic payments, offering varying levels of cost and convenience to the user.
These payment options were managed separately by different teams, and the teams often competed for web presence and resources.
Need for all the teams to align to a common vision, so that the new auto-pay feature serves everyone’s best interests.
Vertiv - Data Catalog
Scope: Product Roadmap & Strategy, Competitive Analysis, User Research, UI/UX Revisions. | Status: Unknown
Problem Space: Vertiv began building an ambitious data catalog for its global data teams, which it also intended to sell commercially. We were brought in midway as UX consultants after they realized they needed to take a few steps back and determine a product vision and a design direction.
Duration - 7 weeks
Competitive analysis
We studied a few other data catalog product offerings that are already on the market. We did a competitive analysis and shared those insights with our client to help them evaluate the product features they have built thus far.
Design probes
I designed the following concepts based on what we learned about data catalogs thus far. We ran these designs with our users to understand their mental model, their current practices, and expectations from a data catalog.
Users Needs:
Find reliable data sources for analytics and reporting
Flag corrupt datasets
Collate datasets and create reports for management needs.
Users would not want to disturb something that they have already built
Stakeholders:
Vertiv’s SMEs
Vertiv’s data team
Vertiv’s developer team
All the product-feature screens grouped and mapped on a figma board
Product Roadmap
The roadmap
Having analyzed all the screens and features of the product, we assessed that the product needed improvement at various levels:
Quick fixes: On-screen changes we need to make to fix the usability issues. These fixes included iconography, vocabulary, terminology, accessibility, adherence to interaction patterns, etc.
Improving overall product experience: These included changes to minimise the learning curve and make the product intuitive and easy to use. We suggested:
Coherent grouping of similar features and categorization of the feature types.
Making important features most accessible,
Suggesting standard and more contextual infographics and visuals to represent data,
Enhancing consistency in Information Architecture,
Creating help, guides, tips, FAQs where needed, etc.
Missing features: Based on the Competitive analysis and SME insights, we also identified several important features that were completely missing in the product, while certain features we identified as less valuable were built with heavy investment. This part of the roadmap involved prioritizing these features based on value.
Finally, we put together an action plan of how the design and dev teams can continue working by making incremental enhancements.
Quick fixes
Based on the agreed roadmap, I identified several quick fixes and UX/UI changes across all existing screens and features. With the help of our visual designer, we created a detailed InVision handbook, which helped the dev team identify and implement our suggested changes on each screen.
Since our client’s dev teams were very distributed and less coordinated. We left enough instructions and updated all screens with all the enhancements, so that they could implement the changes without any conflicts.
Dashboard page of the inVision handbook we created. All the screens are categorized into features. Users could navigate across screens, different sections and learn about the new categorization.
A snippet from Sketch file showing two of the several screens we recommended enhancements.
UX Improvements Suggestions
The next phase of the project has not kicked off yet, but as a starting point to kick off the conversations, I designed these UX feature improvements based on our findings thus far.
User tasks- I defined certain specific tasks users would perform using the catalog. I kept these tasks in mind when designing solutions.
wants to catalog a table
wants to catalog a group of tables (within a schema)
wants to catalog a group of tables (across multiple schemas)
wants to analyze a group of tables (within a schema)
wants to analyze a group of tables (across multiple schemas)
