Project Summary

From Silos to Alignment & Collaboration

Currently, the extension of Journey Mapping to Journey Management helps NCR's Service Design team promote an outside-in style of thinking by allowing other business units to understand the business from the customer’s perspective and designing from this point of view. Through this outside-in application, NCR can provide the most streamline end-to-end journey. This not only reduces friction, but also improves on existing blueprints to be more effective with resources. This makes the power of Journey Management an integral part to design for mature organizations. As NCR adopts a scalable Journey Management approach to customer centricity, dots can be connected more efficiently.Move the slider below to see how Journey Management scaling aligns CX journeys 👇

The Challenge

What is Journey Management?

When embarking on this project, there were multiple issues identified with Journey Management's adoption throughout different units that collaborate closely together:

(1) existing journey maps were scattered in different folders, (2) key stakeholders may not know that folder exist, (3) there is no log of existing folders or work-in-progress, (4) there is no log of changes to those journey maps, and (5) folders are tied to the user's privacy settings so others would have to request permission to view.

Luckily a platform exists to fix this problem. TheyDo.io is user-friendly journey management tool that has been trusted by many Fortune 500 companies, including NCR. However, it's a tool that has an observable technical learning curve; even more so, it has a significant concept-understanding curve.

Discovery

Interviews

I conducted interviews on 6 NCR employees from various departments: Service Design, UX Research, and Product Manager. A recurring pain point was prominent: Many people were not sure what journey management was, what it could do, who it could be used by, and what the benefits would be.

Alternatively, when they did know what Journey Management was, there was usually no time to properly apply the concept when working with other units that weren't aware. This was the step when I first identified that this may not be an adoption problem, but rather a learning problem (or lack-thereof).

Learning Experience Design (LXD)

In relation to UI/UX, Learning Experience Design (LXD) is an extension of the experience with a emphasis on the process of creating learning experiences that allow the learning to achieve the desired learning outcome by placing human-center design and their goals at the forefront. LXD is further broken down into experience, design, and learning.

Competitor Analysis

At this stage, the organization and context of the material was studied and ranked based on various metrics. While the User Interface experience was considered, it was not a key factor taken into account since the approach was identified to be focused on Learning Experience Design (LXD). The metrics were then compared to existing NCR training platforms (these existed in many different places across various platforms). While these platforms did not have any material related to Journey Management Training, they were still studied to understand the current NCR training ecosystem in order to consider their experience in the overall learning path.

Method

LXD Applications

Learning Experience Design (LXD) is rooted in a combination of different disciplines in the "learning" domain to create human-centered and goal-oriented learning experiences. It takes the principles used in User Experience Design and combines it with elements of education, training and development, experiential learning, amongst others. It changes the attention from the "user" to the "learner".

Due to the limited time of the project, interview feedback, and based on existing material on Journey Management in NCR's various platforms mentioned before, I chose to focus on four main principles of LXD:

UX/UI Design

Information Architecture:

FINDABILITY, UNDERSTANDABILITY, UTILITY

Based on the Learning Experience Design (LXD) principles chosen to focus on, a logical order of presentation was established through the lens of Information Architecture. This approach enables the findability, understandability, and utility of the content being presented. Applying an IA approach to the creation of the curriculum and its order, would allow training lessons to be easier to find (findability) and integrate new information seamlessly into the learners daily routine (understandability). In order to apply the utility factor, the introductory section was established with the goal to communicate the value it would bring to the learner. Applying Information Architecture to Learning Experience Design provides order by organizing information in a way that matches the learning level of the audience, or it provides the option for learners to create order themselves (since they can skip sections if they are already familiar with it). Ultimately, it was the foundation to provide a better learning experience and service that allows the learner to make better learning choices.

After establishing the Information Architecture / organization of material, I began to identify where I could include the LXD principles identified earlier in the process.

Mockups Redesign

For this step, I studied my own approach and researched/asked around if any past projects was involved in a "training" approach or platform; and there was! A group of past NCR interns created a training site which I used as backbone for the UI look called NCR Docs, however, I edited and/or added some features that would incorporate the Learning Experience Design (LXD). Below are some of the preview interfaces:

Results

At the end of my internship at NCR, I presented this new training concept as my Expo project. For the presentation, I created a poster, for which I also applied principles of Learning Experience Design (LXD) for easier/quicker understanding of the need to incorporate LXD into all trainings; starting with the practice of Journey Management Training which has the power to align multiple departments pain points, gain points, opportunities, and solutions.

Personal Takeaways

I had four major takeaways from this project and internship:

1. The power of Journey Management - Before I knew that this project would go the route of LXD, I researched all relevant platforms that aid in Journey Management (not just Journey Mapping) and to my surprise, not too many platforms exist. The practice of Journey Management helps companies and teams build a service design system that allows you to effectively manage all customer journeys, no matter how complex they get.

2. The importance of Learning Experience Design (LDX) - Through the practice of LXD, I was able to understand the differences and unions of different User Experience (UX) through the eyes of learners. I was able to apply Service Design throughout the process, UX Architecture not only in the interface but also in the creation of the "curriculum", UX/UI Design that was engaging with the variety of learners, and UX Research.

3. Understanding the way design projects are managed in a corporate setting where multiple teams are involved. In the Service Design team, many other departments rely on Service Design to facilitate the research process. However, Service Design is much bigger in its scope of what it handles and understanding the needs of other departments is of upmost importance.