User Experience Prototyping

Hewlett Packard is a global technology leader with strong emphasis on quality and usability.   HP has engaged CSS on a number of engagements spanning several years to help with large scale complex application design.   One major project we were asked to lead the UI design for a global inventory planning and forecasting system (Project Fulcrum).   We brought in SME's (Subject Matter Experts) from HP business groups around the  world and held intense UX design sessions to gain a team consensus on how to distribute inventory planning to the various regions and countries.  The new new Global Planning system design was then prototyped for Senior Management and eventually deployed throughout HP.  In addition to UX leadership on HP's enterprise systems, CSS has provided numerous training sessions on usability and user experience design.

UI design for Operational systems, pipeline mgmt, Process control systems.

Los Alamos National Labs is best known for its groundbreaking research for the United States Government.  CSS has worked with the lab over a number of years on various internal applications (Work is classified and confidential).    In addition we have provided on-site training and usability mentoring to the internal development teams.

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.

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.

Bank of America engaged CSS to improve the user experience for its customers who visit retail branches.  They were about to invest millions of dollars in a new training system and asked our team to validate the strategy.  CSS performed contextual inquiry research in various areas of the USA to gain a deeper understanding of how branch employees learned and how best to improve their overall performance. This research was then rolled into a new design for branch software and training materials to improve branch staff competency and the overall customer experience for bank customers.