Account management

Client:
Highland Ag Solutions

Product:
Market watch

Industry:
Ag tech

Role:
UX Architect

Background:

During my time at Highland Ag Solutions, I became lead UX designer for one of their newer products. This product was revolutionizing the agriculture tech industry, but was in need of some serious UX love and attention.

Lots of user flow were not well thought through potentially creating a sense of illegitimacy. Not to mention, common flows that were used were confusing and lacked IA.

Project constraints:

Didn’t have enough time to do thorough research with users (although that was in the works)
The agriculture industry is very competitive, thus no competitor information was available to create a competitive analysis as I would’ve liked

The problem

The account creation/login process for Highland Ag MarketWatch was overly complex and internally manual, leading to unnecessary user frustration.
The solution

Design a more automated account creation and login flow to reduce internal process time and create a seamless beginning touchpoint for its users.
The process

Stakeholder syncs
Secondary research
Site maps, user flows, and swimlane diagrams
Wireframe flows
Prototyping
The results

Users can now create and manage their accounts with ease, freeing up project managers from time-consuming manual processes.

Discovery

Secondary research + user interviews

I analyzed common user flows of big players in the tech industry to identify patterns easy learnability. I conducted interviews with various stakeholders and customers better understand how clients use MarketWatch.

Research

Constraints

Didn’t have enough time to do thorough research with users (although that was in the works)
The ag tech is very competitive, thus no competitor information was available to create a competitive analysis as I would’ve liked

Setting Expectations

I gathered my findings and set up a meeting with the stakeholders to discuss potential solutions from my research. From the site map I created, we were able to set a baseline of what the current MarketWatch page looked like and what our future was.

Meeting outcome objective: update existing flows and create new ones that would allow users to easily create and manage their MarketWatch account.

Exploration

Complexity to clarity

What I discovered added to the intricacy of creating and signing into an account?

The current account creation flow was through email and info manually uploaded by PMs.
We needed a way for tech admin users to access different companies.
The current login process was overly complex.
- Users had two ways of accessing the login page
- If it was a user’s first time logging in, they would need to enter their phone number for 2FA .
- We needed a way for tech admin users to access different companies.
- Anti-trust policy had to be checked after every part of the login process no matter first time sign in or previous user.

Swimlane diagram

I used a swimlane diagram to understand the interaction points between admins adding new users and setting up their commodity permissions and a non-admin user creating their account.
User flow chart

Before beginning wires, I wanted to ensure I and the rest of the team were aligned with the future flow. I created a baseline of what currently existed and how it could be simplified in the future.
Wire flow

Often I found a lot of mistake were made when PM's tried explaining confusing flows to devs. To mitigate communication and execution error, I created a wires flow from my hifi wires after various levels fidelity iterations.