Usability Walk-Throughs

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.

Spirent is a leading technology supplier for enterprise network testing software.  Their soft is used by the world's largest ISP's to assure Quality of Service and high reliability.  CSS has us to review their applications and help improve the usability.  We provided  UX Strategy, designs and standards for the key network testing applications the sell to clients.   In addition we provided on-site team mentoring so their global IT staff had a better understanding of usability and how specifically they could apply the principles of user centered design to their applications.

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.

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.

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.  

Our consultants have worked on over 300 interface design projects for Global 2000 companies and software vendors.Our range of expertise includes software design for insurance, banking, financial services, manufacturing, logistics, government, retail, healthcare, software, technology, utilities and consumer web product companies.   Due to NDA and client confidentiality around most of our projects,  we do not share detailed work products on this or any other public websites.