Project: Canal Plus - Orange OBS
Date: August 2022
My role: Problem framing workshop, user interviews, persona, experience map, prioritization, documentation.
Context
Canal Plus has an internal tool called BTAO, which is a retractable desktop band used to assist and give support to canal plus clients on the phone.
After a trial with other companies to change the band, Canal Plus has approached Orange OBS aiming to revamp the band and the way their end-users use the services, knowing they had to move fast and would only proceed with the UI if they could have a different UX result from the previous tryouts.
Canal Plus has internally worked on a PPT file with a better interface of the band, although, they expected to skip all the design thinking methods and wanted to see mockups already.
Actual Canal Plus band
Version done by the client on PPT
Problem
Canal plus uses 11 different companies across Europe and Africa to attend its biggest market in France, with several people working internally, with too many requests, and convincing the client to have access to their database and talk to these people was very difficult.
In the beginning, the client was a bit reticent with all the design thinking methods we had proposed because of their history with other companies that didn’t excel their expectations. Even though, we had the need to organize a couple of workshops to better understand and define their problem.
Framing problem workshop
It was best to organize a problem-framing workshop where the heads of Canal Plus BTAO project attended online.
On the call, we had 2 canal plus consultants, 1 flow manager, 2 product owners, 2 deployment managers, 3 relationship managers, 1 main stakeholder. In this workshop, we aimed to define the ecosystem and the tools inside the band, converge and prioritize common objectives and problems, analyze risks, define the target and the milestones.
Divide and conquer.
As we had 11 participants, I’ve decided to divide them into teams to move on with the workshop. We have found many problems and sometimes it was difficult to find common sense.
I’ve discovered that the band has many other services attached to it to help the consultants on do their work, but they are not always inside the same system. The objective was to make it simple, beautiful and intuitive, synchronize the tools and make consultants work faster, but we found many other problems.
User interviews / Persona
The next step was the user interviews, but the client didn’t really want it to happen because they thought knew the problems they had, they didn’t want to extend it to the end-users to find problems they are not supposed to tackle at the moment, and they were also afraid for us to have access to secret information about their clients. But I insisted because I really needed to know the end user and their problems, so Canal + gave me 5 users (three level 2 consultants, one level 1 consultant, and one soon-to-be supervisor). These 2 kinds of consultants, level 1 and 2, treat different subjects. After talking to these users I was able to work on 2 personas, one based on the interviews and another one based on the survey.
After the interviews, I could send a survey to collect more data and get to know all the common issues the client didn’t mention during the problem framing workshop, and they were many.
Our online survey with closed questions was sent to 300 users. With the client, we’ve decided to work with closed questions to treat it faster later on, and we could collect 214 answers. Within the survey, we found very interesting numbers, like 71% of the users took 1 or 2 weeks to understand the band, and 6,1% took more than 2 months. 35% of the users are not happy with the band. 29% of the users don’t know all the buttons and its meaning.
A survey containing 15 closed questions was sent to 300 users - 214 answers.
Experience map
Following up with the process, as I didn’t have access to the band, I asked the client to send me videos explaining how to use the tools. After analyzing the 4 videos I had, and after collecting a bunch of information from the users, I was able to work on a step-by-step experience map on my own, and then the clients helped me to complete each step. I also worked on a small benchmark to show what the other bands look like.
Experience map chart
Prioritization
After analyzing the user interviews, the survey, and the experience map, I structured all the information collected into 4 different categories: Process Improvement/Training, UI, Functional Improvement, and Technical Problems.
After getting all the information I needed, I decided to rank the post-its from most important to least important. Priority, Low Priority, less Priority, and Out of Scope. We also agreed that the technical changes should be handled inside canal plus with one of their partner companies.
Conclusion
Canal plus team was super happy with the studies and has decided to move on with Orange OBS to the next phase.
They will now meet up with the Dev team from Orange to review what can and can’t be done within the time and budget they have.
During the process, we found out that in terms of usage, the end-users interviewed were somehow happy with the UI of the band, but it is difficult to confirm 100% because, during the interviews, their respective managers were beside them even against our will, but I could not control it. They know the design of the band can be improved but the main issues are technical to be solved internally, and also creating buttons for easy access to external services should be a plus. They think the work by itself becomes robotic after some time because the process is always the same. The canal plus team is a bit skeptical about some of the changes I’ve flagged after interviewing users, but even if out of scope, for now, I had to portray them because they were very representative.