2020

Director, Software Engineer

Senior, Software Engineer

Product Owner

UX Lead

UX/UI: Me

Trade Fund's (Disney) objective is to automate the creation of Home Entertainment Releases by tracking compliance for all accounts bound by Annual Deal Trade Fund contracts. Trade Craft currently tracks compliances for 12 retailers and reports marketing requirements across an average of 45 home entertainment releases per year. 

As a UX/UI designer, I supported Trade Craft in discovery, design, and delivery and eventually transitioned into a permanent role for ongoing updates and support. Our team worked directly and received feedback from power users, business, and TC’s Director of Marketing. This case study will walk through the design decisions made, coupled with TC’s design principles, for defining an MVP.

1. How are reports currently generated?
   • • Once updates received by a manager, a manager will generate reports using powerpoint which consists of screenshots, image uploads, and excel data points. This report is sent out to stakeholders for confirmation.
2. How are contracts currently created?
   • • Sales will work directly with vendors to created contracts for specific releases and title tiers.
     • This is documented in an excel template. Example shows disorganization/clutterness.
     • This contract is used as a guide for auditing and reporting.
3. How do managers currently monitor report status for a given release?
   • • Audit vendors check on compliance item on site and update status using excel.
     • Managers check reports periodically and prioritize urgency surrounding release dates by calling vendors

After understanding the roles of each user within compliance reporting, I created user task flows to communicate the flow of the process to our team and provide a general view of how the proposed interface should intend to work in its most efficient form. The diagram provides a step-by-step breakdown of what each user will see and do in order to complete the compliance reporting process.

Real-Time reporting

Visual Dashboard that will report the overall status of any given release

Management

Automating reporting by centralizing data inputs across 3 teams (Trade Spend, sales, and audit vendors

Business Info Centralization

Allowing Trade Craft to manage audit compliance in real-time—obtain updates that include evidentiary assets in order to show status. 

Mobility

Enabling vendors to upload and monitor the commitment information on a laptop or a mobile device.

One of my goals for discovery involves understanding Trade Crafts’s requirements and constraints early on. This allowed me to prioritize my design roadmap while still grounding my focus too user needs. Here are a few takeaways:

1. Authentication users with TC ID
2. User source systems: API’s for Title, Tier, and Release Dates
3. Use of Trade Craft's approved stack of technology and infrastructure teams
4. Front-end built using React
5. Responsive requirements for web and mobile
6. Push notifications requirements
7. Native camera functionality for uploads
8. 24x7 Dashboard capability’s for real-time updates and reports on-demand
9. UI ability to export and print digital reports

Designing the title cards focuses on urgency and high-level overview. This includes progress bars and countdown chips to emphasize time sensitivity. Because users primarily focus their attention on upcoming releases, I chose to utilize the carousel component which displays in sequence of importance.

With over 12 accounts 8 categories to monitor, our team decided to simplify the process by using colored circles to represent status of an item (ie: red: needs work, green: complete). For managers, this helped reduce the time in identifying business-critical items at a glance.

Items can be duplicated, moved, and dragged into individual title tiers. This feature improves the user’s workflow and efficiency when delegating repetitive compliance items.

After talking with users, I learned that planning a contract is very much like creating a schedule. This introduced the idea which allows admins to schedule compliances across multiple weeks in the same workspace. Simply add the number of weeks in the left sidebar and personalize each week's compliance roadmap.

Key takeaways:

1. Real-time reporting
   • Reduce compliance report complete time from 6-8 hours per release to under 30 minutes
2. Management
   • Increase consistency, reduce errors and improve report viewing ability for stakeholders
   • Users can easily detect areas of urgency with status icons
3. Business information centralization
   • Sales reps will be able to find out in real-time when marketing campaigns are not meeting expectations and perform tasks before release deadlines.
4. Mobility
   • Enabling users to upload and monitor the commitment information on their phones significantly reduces upload time and increases live report updates. 

 1.  To prioritize experience over features

• • For an enterprise product powered by both end-users and internal stakeholders, feature scope becomes a dominant force which may sway design, development, and business decisions. I learnt this balance—while being grounded by our power users’ needs.

2.  Learning to coexist with high-level engineers

• • My experience with engineers continues to grow as we work together to define the source of truth, especially with tight deadlines. Trade fund has provided me with complex requirements which have allowed me to proactively communicate with the engineers so that I can simplify it for our users.

3. Never stop pushing the boundaries!

• • Even reputed, established organizations are open to change if it brings value. While considering what I can or cannot design due to constraints, it was important to provide alternative options to introduce new ideas and solutions without the fear of being shut down.