Portfolio

Insurance quoting applications, training

Progressive Insurance has been a customer experience leader in the property and casualty insurance market for many years.  CSS has worked with Progressive since 1994 and assisted in the design of numerous internal and customer facing websites and applications.  Our work involved detailed UX design for their call center customer service systems, claims systems, agent systems and underwriting risk assessment systems.   Our training on usability and user experience over a period of more than 12 years helped solidify a robust usability practice and strong alignment of User Experience across the various business units. We also assisted in the establishment of a formal usability practice with internal usability testing labs. This knowledge was then shared across the corporation with GUIguide  our enterprise best practices usability portal.

Tyco Connectivity is the world's largest supplier of passive electronic devices.  Their parts are found in nearly every automobile and cell phone in addition to thousands of other products that touch our lives daily.  To drive business and market share expansion, Tyco engaged CSS on several global E-business initiatives over a multi-year timespan to improve the usability of their systems.   Our work involved improving multiple internal and partner facing applications deployed globally that integrated with Oracle and SAP.   In addition we provided UX strategy and innovation in how Tyco allowed global customer to find products, order samples and place orders.   Our work then extended to improving the corporate website and involved integration of 52 sub-brands under the Tyco label.

Boeing engaged CSS to help with several complex User Experience challenges with their F15 - Fighter Aircraft flight trainers and their Apache Long-bow helicopter maintenance systems.   These engagements involved field research with pilots and maintenance crews to best understand how to improve user performance with these critical defense systems. We also were engaged to improve the usability of a global document management system for the maintenance of Boeing aircraft.

Netapp is one of the world's leading providers of enterprise storage solutions.  To fuel their global expansion they initiated a business transformational project within the company to focus on ease of doing business within their customers and their multi-tier distribution channel.  We were selected as the vendor of choice to provide User Experience strategy, consulting and design for the project.   The project spanned several years, was the largest project in NetApp's history with over 250 people.  Our team provided overall UX direction, research, design and detailed specifications for the development and deployment of NetApp's quote to cash Oracle R12 applications and seamless integration of these applications within Salesforce.com.   Our team worked closely with Process Architects to visualize the business requirements with interactive prototypes and deliver detailed UX specifications to the functional, technical and QA teams.  Our team served the critical role of created UX deliverable that were key to assuring the business requirements were translated into a usable design that was implemented by technology teams.    The project was successfully implemented globally across NetApp's internal sales teams (QuoteEdge),  partners (PartnerEdge) and multi-tier sales channels and has helped continue to fuel sales growth and global market expansion.

The Mayo Clinic is world renown for leading edge medical research and treatment.   Creating highly usable and effective medical solutions for their organization is critical for success.   CSS has been engaged on numerous engagements with Mayo to help with improving usability of internal software solutions.  In addition CSS provided Usability training and assisted Mayo Clinic in the adoption and rollout of of enterprise user interface design standards using our GUIguide usability standards portal.  

Blue Cross needed help improving the productivity and reducing call times in their call center while maintaining a high customer satisfaction level.  CSS worked led the a redesign effort to dramatically reduce the number of screens needed to answer most customer calls and improve call center productivity.  The success of this application led to additional projects where we improved call center productivity for claims processing and customer inquiries.   Blue Cross also worked with CSS to train a large their developers and business analysts on the principles of Usability through our on-site seminars.

ABN AMRO is a leading financial services firm based in Europe with operations in the USA. They engaged CSS to help design and test a major online initiative to sell Mortgages (Purchase and Refinance) through their Mortgage.com website.  The legacy back-end loan origination and approval system was very cumbersome and our goal was to shield the user from this with a modern, efficient user interface.   We worked with the Mortgage.com team to fully understand the legacy system and it's limitations.   We then created a UX design and interactive prototype to simulate how a new solution would work and validated this design with key business stakeholders.  Once approved, we performed formal usability testing and refined the prototype to deliver an optimal user experience for applying and getting approved for a home loan.  Mortgage.com was launched with great success and eventually acquired by Citicorp to grow their online mortgage business.