ACTIVThrust | UX | Design

Dell realized it has several major clients struggling to manage thousands of leases. For Dell, this meant that clients were experiencing frustration and these were extremely large enterprise customers who may have thousands of leases in varying states. The initial challenge is to reimagine the lease management process. The thought is that these clients could benefit from a Customer Portal. Dell gathers a global team.

Create a Dell Financial Services Customer Portal software application that streamlines the Lease Management program for Large Enterprise lease customers.

DFS Global Customer Portal

Review your account details at any time

• View and manage your DFS assets
• Easily view your contract information
• Review invoices and payment status as required
• Manage end-of-lease options

This project included a global Dell Financial Services team. The Business team is Dublin, Ireland-based. I'm in Austin, Texas but I've been contracted through Dell to work directly with the Brazil development team. This is my second Senior UX Lead (Engineer) role with this team but this time the entire international team meets in Austin and we start a war room at Dell to garner stakeholder input.

The DFS Global Customer Portal North America Extended team of stakeholders included:

CSMB eCommerce • CSMB Sales • CSMB Marketing • PLI Sales • Channel Sales Debbie Haub • PLI Marketing TBD • Consumer Care • SMB Care • Office of the Customer • BI/Reporting • Collections • PLI Care/Collections/Invoicing • EOL • SFDC Business Admin • Compliance/Privacy • Legal • DFS L&D

• The scope of work was Requirements Based
• Discovery was limited to Business teams
• A six month deadline
• Business and Development teams only in US for a week
• No resources provided other than the meeting room and large pads
• The application would have to comply with SalesForce.com bandwidth limitations
• Usability would depend not only on bandwidth limitations but with how many records could be called and edited

The kickoff began with a DFS North American Transactional Workshop.

• Approval of all Priority 1 & 2 process maps/feature sets
• Capture/Validate all interlock needs
• MVP and feature prioritization
• ‘Story-ready’
• Next Steps/Parking Lot

Working from a general requirements document I found it helpful to convert the Workshop takeaway charts into architecture. While the focus was Large Enterprise multi-account users, once we had a solution, I simplified the UI to allow for SMB single account users.

My first goal was to complete a single pathway to understand how the user would experience the workflows by creating more simple, more direct pathways utilizing predictable and reasonable cognitive loads. Once I was able to achieve balance in one Pathway such as the Payment Path, working through the Account(s) & Leases, Assets and Messaging fell in place.

I began with a presentation deck (see PDF's below). Using a combination of existing IA process flows, and the Epics documentation, I needed to visually organize the structure. Several calls were spent reviewing the Epics with the Business in Ireland. My development team was located in Brazil.

As part of our kickoff meeting, I sketched out a 70-100 possible layout thoughts in the form of thumbnail drawings. Later I converted them to these larger sketches which formed the basis of later digital wireframes.

By viewing this pathway, we gained a better understanding of what we wanted and didn't want to do in our user experience. The preferred tone was changed to be more conversational. This low fidelity series kept our conversations about function not design.

We iterated with different styles based on Dell Microsite Design Pattern standards. At each stage we went back to the key decision makers for feedback.

Dell was working with another company and negotiated to merge this product plus two others. They leveraged our wireframes and prototypes to create myDFS.com site.

Their summary indicates that their application offers the features that were part of recommended solution.

• Contracts – at-a-glance view of all your DFS contracts, including Contract Numbers, Start Dates and Invoice status plus the ability to export details via excel.
• Account Overview – all your account details, including Term Dates or let us know when a payment will be sent.
• Previous Invoices – with data broken down by Invoice Dates, Due Dates, Total Amount and the ability to download a copy of your rental invoice.
• Asset Details – including leasing Status, equipment Serial Numbers, Asset Types and Asset Description plus the ability to add additional information in the fields provided for each DFS asset or use myDFS.com to store asset information from other lessors.