New AiM Authenticate Customer Portal

Brief

New AiM Authenticate customer portal is a web platform for users (i.e. AiM’s external customers in the automotive industry and AiM inspector teams) to access vehicle inspection history with photos, fill out forms and generate PDF reports. I collaborated with product manager, business analyst, and developers to gather requirements, brainstorm, and create mockups to facilitate the UX share session.

Design Process (In General, not specific to this project)

Challenges

New AiM Authenticate Customer Portal is more of an enterprise-facing platform so it has a lot of complicated process flows and use cases, I spent a lot of time researching, discussing with business analyst and attending stakeholder meeting to familiarize myself with the scenarios and terminology used on the previous platform. After fully understanding the workflows, I optimized and summarized the user flows and proposed mockups for design solutions.

Note: New AiM Authenticate Customer Portal is one of the project I worked at AiM. I managed UX work across multiple project teams at AiM but most projects are still work in progress so I couldn’t show them here.

Since all projects are confidential, I think it might be beneficial to share some of my learning experience working at AiM.

You can also contact me to learn more about my design process and experience.

Key Takeaways from all projects I worked at AIM

1. A balance between business and UX requirements

   When the project started, I joined the stakeholder meeting with the business analyst and project manager to understand the business requirements. After discussing with the business analyst on the use cases, I researched and summarized the user flow for the overall experience and started working on the mockups. During the design process, we got rid of some features due to the trade-off between business and UX requirements and I’ve learned the way to present my design with more options and explain pros and cons for each design solution.

   
   

2. Sometimes it is better to jump right into creating hi-fi mockups

   For some projects, I jumped right into creating hi-fi mockups after gathering and analyzing findings from user research since hi-fi mockups make more sense for the decision-makers. For some stakeholder/client, they can’t imagine how low-fi mockups will serve certain purposes for the project. I’ve learned to be flexible and adapted to the situations and delivered whatever could facilitate the cross-functional team discussion.

   
   

3. Always invest time investigating current user needs if you join the project midway

   For one of the projects, I joined the team in the middle of the process. The team provided me with the previous wireframes. Instead of going straight and making wireframes into low-fi/hi-fi prototypes, I invested some time to dig into the previous research findings (ex: documentation) and figured out that this project should have a well-planned UX research roadmap since no UX research has been done before and I was not sure if the wireframes included features of great user value. I proposed my UX research plan, listed out each critical milestones and an estimated timeframe for each research activity. Fortunately, my product owner agreed with my proposal and we presented our thoughts and plan with the stakeholder in the weekly meeting. We were able to recruit some users to participate in the interview by teleconferencing. By actually being able to talk to end users and collecting their feedback, I reevaluated the previous wireframes and proposed an updated version, which captured user needs and eliminated their dislikes from the previous wireframes. I really appreciate that I have the support from my team and the stakeholder so we could deliver product of great functionalities and values for the end users.

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