Overview
Opportunity
The Partner Incentives site helps partners recoup their costs promoting and selling Microsoft software all over the world.
I joined an newly formed internal UX team after an alpha release done by an outside design agency, adding senior leadership to address various issues customers had raised regarding the experience
Outcome
During my time, I led and contributing to multiple projects that were prioritized for development.
These included implementing changes for reconciliation filtering and duplicate claims identification, creating a new vision for payment release tool, developing the View as Partner feature and proposing a substantial redesign to the claim filing form.
My Role
During this project, I was the lead designer for the primary UX challenges facing Microsoft partners and internal customers. My work included a mix of user research, visual design, wireframing, story writing and interactive prototyping.
Work Highlights
Claim Filing Walkthrough
The original form was difficult to read, utilized poor UI standards and felt over designed.
The proposed solution focuses the user on the step at hand, trying to improve completion accuracy. It also features a contextual knowledge feature that appears and changes depending on which element is in focus to help enhance completion rates.
Filing Period Walkthrough
Initially, a proposed direction for the page underwent significant changes that were validated with existing customers. However, due to the complexity involved, the engineering team found it challenging to implement in the near term.
Nonetheless, we recognized the need for a solution that would simplify the controls for viewing a specific period. To address this, I borrowed a portion of the proposed solution and refactored it into a version that eventually made its way to production.
This simplification had a positive impact on partner satisfaction, and we observed a reduction in the number of support issues filed after its implementation.
Overview
Opportunity
The Partner Incentives site helps partners recoup their costs promoting and selling Microsoft software all over the world.
I joined an newly formed internal UX team after an alpha release done by an outside design agency, adding senior leadership to address various issues customers had raised regarding the experience
Outcome
During my time, I led and contributing to multiple projects that were prioritized for development.
These included implementing changes for reconciliation filtering and duplicate claims identification, creating a new vision for payment release tool, developing the View as Partner feature and proposing a substantial redesign to the claim filing form.
My Responsibilities
User Research
We had no formal researchers to leverage on this project. I was able to gain insight into customer experiences via claim auditing, customer success calls and some sporadic user feedback presentations to validate direction of proposed designs
Visual Design
I was solely responsible for all the user interface design created for various solutions.
Interaction Design
I defined the structure and behavior for all the solutions in the case study
Prototyping
For small, non-technical investigations, I used Keynote to help visualize solutions.
I also built HTML/CSS/JS prototypes, coding and hacking my way to a vision.
Filing Claims
Early on, the program manager for Claims had communicated that they were experiencing long turn times and delayed payments to partners. The alpha testers were having some difficulties filing their claims with the new tool and despite attentive claims support, MSIT was not making progress toward reaching their target pay out goals month over month.
I started by doing a heuristic evaluation, documenting elements in the experience that did not live up to common usability patterns. Through additional conversations with partners and conducting my own extensive audit of every claim, I determined the form had structural and presentation issues that were leading to errors that could be easily avoided.
I proposed that we consider modifying the experience and built a web-based prototype to test my initial assumptions from my research. Unfortunately, priorities changed and I didn't get the chance to get this in front of users to build a case to move forward. The video below shows the original interface and new concept for context.
Claim Filing Walkthrough
The original form was difficult to read, utilized poor UI standards and felt over designed.
The proposed solution focuses the user on the step at hand, trying to improve completion accuracy. It also features a contextual knowledge feature that appears and changes depending on which element is in focus to help enhance completion rates.
Reconciliation Filtering
Our partners were expressing concern over the filtering functions of the Claims Summary page. The period defaulted to the entire fiscal year, which was not an accurate reflection of remaining available funds for the claim period. Because of this, claims submitted were either rejected or not paid in full because what the partner saw was different from the reality.
With such uncertainty, I wanted to align any future solution to ensure there was no confusion about what claims period the partner was looking at.
Filing Period Walkthrough
The initial direction proposed made vast changes to the entire page, which I validated with existing customers, but it was too complex near term for the engineering team to tackle.
We still needed a solution that simplified the controls for viewing a period, so I borrowed a portion of the proposed solution and refactored into what ultimately made it to production
This simplification led to higher partner satisfaction and, we saw fewer support issues filed after its delivery.
Duplicate Claims
As partners file claims, there is always a chance that some will include the same proof/invoices invalidly on additional claims resulting in an incorrect payment. To prevent that we needed a method for the vendor partners to determine if there were duplicates in our tool at the time of evaluation and approval.
Duplicate Claims Flow
The vendors had been using a spreadsheet as a point of reference to capture claim data and to compare against as they evaluated a claim.
The ideal solution would be doing the work in the background and letting the vendor know about possible duplicates, but the engineers pushed back stating that comparing each in the background would affect system integrity and stability.
To reduce the number of calls, the interaction to check for a duplicate would be to ask the vendor to explicitly check after opening a claim. This would surface claims with possible conflicts and enable the vendor to quickly assess if true or not.
Payment Delivery Tool
The Partner Incentives platform did not have an automated validation workflow on payments, resulting in a highly manual and lengthy processes prior to payment release.
To solve these issues, the Payments teams sought to create a new tool as part of the Partner Incentive portal to manage outgoing payments that would automatically check for financial compliance and release to Partners faster.
