Case study

Technology Workbench

What if tech engineers at a large regional bank could complete all their tasks from a single platform?

The challenge

The tech engineers at DBS, a large multinational bank, had to access multiple different systems and platforms in their daily work. This led to frustration with manual toil, a lack of focus, and time wasted in context switching.

ClientDBS

Year2022

RoleUX research & design sprints (team of 7, with a UX lead, 2 designers, 2 BAs and a PM)

RecognitionGood Design Mark 2023

Qualitative research
Workshop facilitation
UI/UX

The process

1
Discover
- Material review
- contextual inquiries
2
Define
- Validation workshops
- prioritisation workshop
3
Develop
- Ideation workshops
- solution prioritisation
- sprint planning
4
Deliver
- Design outputs
- development handoff

1 · Discover

I supplemented a material review of IT engineers’ end-to-end journeys with contextual inquiries with 3 engineers, to get a real sense of what a typical journey looks like for them, from the time they receive and triage a ticket, perform root cause analysis, to the resolution of the ticket, and beyond.

The engineers’ open-plan office, with monitoring dashboards on large screens.

Engineers working at their desks, each with several screens, during a contextual inquiry.

What we discovered

Too many different systems with different entry points

Engineers needed to access many different platforms to address a single ticket, resulting in toil.

Lack of clarity on which team tickets should be transferred to

Difficulty in ascertaining the appropriate team to transfer a ticket to, either due to lack of information or complexity of ticket.

Handoff between engineers is not seamless

Friction when transferring tickets leads to duplicate effort in investigating or resolving tickets.

2 · Define

Thereafter, I conducted workshops with 20 engineers across 3 markets to validate the uncovered pain points, and to have them rate the impact and frequency of these pains.

A remote validation workshop on Microsoft Teams, with participants on video and the session slides shared.

This enabled us to run a prioritisation workshop with the project stakeholders, to arrive at a view of the highest-priority pain points for the integrated tool to address.

A spreadsheet of pain points, each rated by engineers for impact and frequency.

An issue prioritisation matrix, with pain points plotted by impact and frequency.

3 · Develop

I ran remote ideation workshops with 20 participants from cross-functional teams across 4 markets, generating 60+ ideas. These were prioritised on implementation impact and effort, which allowed us to develop a holistic MVP roadmap covering the design, process and change management efforts needed to make the tool a working reality.

20: participants
4: markets
60+: ideas generated

An ideation canvas from a remote workshop, with the issue, guiding questions and clusters of ideas.

The MVP roadmap, with ideas planned across design sprints.

4 · Deliver

Working in an agile approach, I ran design sprints alongside daily stand-ups with the project team, weekly design reviews with the client’s design team, and biweekly sprint showcases. This gave us rapid, constant feedback, and let us raise and resolve questions quickly and iterate on designs swiftly.

Password-protected screen

The default Technology Workbench homepage, with the key widgets applicable to the different engineers.

Password-protected screen

Ticket listing page.

Password-protected screen

Ticket detail page.

Password-protected screen

Reports page, for team managers to have visibility over how their teams are doing, the top issue areas, and trends over time.

The upshot

We were heartened when the client reached out some months later to let us know the project had been awarded the Singapore Good Design Mark 2023, in the Experience Design category.

Winner of Singapore Good Design Mark 2023,
Experience Design category.