User Experience Field Studies

REI is a leading outdoor gear and apparel retailer.   Their stores have been a great example of brand alignment with a unique and exceptional customer experience.  CSS was engaged with REI on numerous engagements to improve usability and the overall user experience for the warehousing and inventory control systems.  We were also engaged to help on in-store application designs for new employee training and merchandise returns.   This work involved contextual inquiry of work environments and improving existing user interface solutions.  To help spread user experience knowledge throughout REI we were engaged to offer several on-site training seminars focused specifically on the needs and challenges facing the REI development team.

Bell Canada is the leading telecom provider in Canada.  The company embarked on an initiative to improve overall customer satisfaction in their call centers and physical stores.   CSS was engaged to help improve the user experience in these critical areas.   We performed contextual inquiry research in various call centers and identified key friction points to address with the call center software design.   Working with the teams at Bell Canada we developed a UX strategy and design concepts that eventually evolved into a working prototype.  This prototype was then usability tested and revised based on user feedback and hand-off to the development team.

Sybase is a world leader in high-availability distributed enterprise database technology.   CSS was brought in to improve the usability of Sybase Replication Server - a core product driving a higher percentage of revenue for the company.   Replication server is used by the world's leading financial and service organizations to run extremely high volume environments like the world's major Stock Exchanges.   We worked alongside the engineers to identify solutions that would simplify the management overhead associated with Replication Server while maintaining quick and efficient user interfaces for seasoned Replication DBA's.   These changes allowed Sybase to enter new markets and reduce the TCO for clients adopting their Replication technology.

GMAC Insurance made a major push into expanding their Auto Insurance business and called on CSS to help with this effort.  Our team helped GMAC understand the unique needs of an online Quoting application for their demographic market and developed a UX strategy to guide the team toward a successful launch of their quoting website.  We worked with a business process team to visualize the requirements and created wireframes and a working prototype as input into the functional and technical design process.    Our team performed contextual inquiry and user studies in their call centers and field offices.   Finally, we validated the design with usability testing and direct user feedback.

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.

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.