How can we improve Ecolab's product ordering experience?
Duration
8 weeks
Team
1 Product Designer
1 Product Owner
Tasks
Research, UX, UI, Prototyping, Design Sprint
About Ecolab
​
Ecolab is a chemical company that delivers water, hygienic, and infection protection solutions and services that protect people and vital resources. They currently have customers in more than 40 industries and 30 million customer locations.
​
​
What happens in a Service Call?
​
Salespeople and technicians physically inspect customers’ equipment to ensure things are running efficiently. After that, the whole service call process is reactive, and service people respond to problems when they are on-site. They record all these observations on the ES&S app.
​
Background research insights
"In a recent poll among Ecolab's sales and service associates, we discovered that more than half of their time was spent in non-customer-facing activities like driving, tracking orders, or doing administrative tasks. "
"Ecolab is trying to free up time for these associates to spend more time creating value for their customers."
Challenge
The current ES&S does not adhere to the design principles and accessibility standards, which are essential for the users to access the app easily.
What are the present usability issues of the ES&S product ordering page, and How can these usability issues be fixed?
Relevance and Significance
The users, who are corporate account managers and sales agents, frequently complain in-district meetings and other forums about how the inefficiency of the app is causing issues when dealing with customers. Some examples of issues are not being able to find the product requested by the customer, inaccurate product description, and no indication of product availability status. In the district meeting, service agents have been complaining about the poor usability of the app.
This is causing stress among the employees of Ecolab because corporate account managers and sales agents are not able to perform their job efficiently, and the customers may also not be happy based on the feedback received by service agents when visiting the customers as sometimes wrong items end up being delivered, or there are delivery delays.
UX Research
Step 1 - Heuristic Evaluation - We performed the heuristic evaluation of the ES&S app based on Jacob Neilson’s and Prof. Chuck’s ten heuristics and decided the issues that must be targeted.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
Step 2 - Competitive Analysis - We then performed a competitive analysis based on some of Ecolab’s competitors, which helped us understand the common issues faced by similar customer service applications.
​
Step 3 - Usability Test - We then conducted a usability study and a few interviews to test the Ecolab Sales and Service app's product ordering feature and aim to understand how the users interact with the app to order products for their customers.
​
Step 4 - Design Sprint - We then conducted a 2 -day design sprint flying everyone, including CAMs and Service agents, to St Paul, MN.
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
​
Usability Tests Conducted
Interviews
Conducted
Participants Profile
12
60 min usability tests
4
30 minute interviews
16
Corporate Account Managers, Sales and Service Agents (3 ES&S Champions )
Key research insights
"The Schedule to visit different customers is not customizable, and the recommended schedule is sometimes not time efficient."
​
" Updates to the ES&S app are not being informed to the users."
​
"No on-screen descriptions for what different color pins mean on the Map"
​
" Ecolab's Virtual Assistant is not useful as it does not provide useful response"
​
Information Architecture
Before Wireframing, I created the information architecture diagram to better organize the navigation system of the app
Low Fidelity Designs
I then developed the Lofi designs and worked with the developers to discuss the feasibility of the designs, as we had restricted ourselves to the salesforce design system.
Final Designs
After testing the first set of wireframes, I iterated based on feedback from stakeholders and developers to check the feasibility of the designs and created the final prototypes using Figma.
Pagination instead of Infinite scroll
We designed to use pagination so that users can easily navigate to a specific page of content, which can be helpful when looking for something specific.
Order of products displayed
We decided to rearrange the products personalizing them to each user based on the recently ordered products, then contracted products, and then alphabetically arranging them.
Product Information Page
Based on the feedback, we decided to reorganize the product information page so that sales agents find it easy to access information when they are at the customer's location. Also, we included a direct link to the Ecolab sales support product page if the user needs additional information
Added Product availability indications
Added indications to avoid delays due to the user ordering products that are not available.
Outcome
We identified and fixed the usability issues of the existing ES&S app and redesigned it so that it is relatively easy to use. These designs were then handed off to the development team to integrate these changes into the existing app gradually. I presented my final prototype to Sales agents and received great feedback.
“This would make our job so much easier.”
Corporate Account Manager, Ecolab
"Thank you for connecting our agents who work in the field, as we had no clue it was frustrating them so much."
Product Owner, Ecolab
“ I love these designs I hope Ecolab brings these changes soon.”
Sales Agent, Ecolab
Learnings
This experience was beneficial for me. I had a chance to experience spreading the gospel of good UX in a company like Ecolab, which recently started developing digital solutions. I had a chance to show them how beneficial good UX is and how happy users will be when we incorporate feedback into our designs.