User Interface Design Consulting

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.

Chicago Title Insurance is a leading provider of title insurance within the USA.   CSS was engaged to improve the productivity and usability of the software they provide to Title Agents in their offices throughout the USA.   Our work involved greatly simplifying the number of screens required to process a title package and providing quick summary views for easy navigation.  In addition we provided User Experience training to various teams within the company to build internal expertise for future application design initiatives.

Edward Jones is a one of the world's leading investment and financial services firms.  Having quick, efficient and highly professional investment advisors is critical to their world-class brand.  CSS was brought in to help with the user interface design of internal applications and to provide in-house training on Usability and User Experience for the internal development staff.

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.

ADP is a leading provider of HR and Payroll Services to Global 2000 firms.   We are asked to evaluate and provide UX recommendations on the improving the UX for various internal applications utilized by ADP and their customers.   In addition we provided on-site training and UX mentoring for the team to help solidify UX Best Practices and expertise within ADP.